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The  Revolution  of  Everyday  Life 


'*^-        *  SPECIAL  EOmOl     ,, 

IVE  YEARS  OF  CLAMOR  INTERVIEWS: 

Howard  Zinn  •  Chuck  D  •  Mikte  Davis 

Studs  Terkel  •  Dead  Prez  •  Boots  Riley 

Laura  Flanders  •Elizabeth  Martinez 

Christian  Parenti  •  Derrick  Jensen 

John  K.  SamsQi^  Carol  Leigh 


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>  1  Fall  2005  •  Issue  33.5 

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new  interviews  with 

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PRINTS  -  GRAFFITI  -  ZINES  -  BOOKS  -  STENCILS 

CELEBRATE  PEOPLE'S  HISTORY  POSTERS  -  POLITICAL  T-SHIRTS 


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from  your  editors 

We  thought  that  the  best  way  to  celebrate  Clamor's  first  five  years  was  to  look  back  to  some  of 
the  gems  you  may  have  forgotten  or  missed.  We  knew  in  the  first  30  issues,  we've  had  a  lot  of 
interesting  people  making  an  appearance  in  Clamor,  but  it  wasn't  until  we  sat  down  and  made  a 
list  of  all  the  interviews  that  we  realized  we  were  going  to  have  a  hard  time  picking  which  ones 
to  feature  in  this  special  edition.  We  settled  on  twelve  of  our  favorites  to  complement  two  new 
interviews  exclusive  to  this  special  edition  —  bonus  tracks,  if  you  will. 

Clamor,  as  a  rule,  features  individuals  who  are  brilliant,  who  are  trying  to  carve  out  a  better  pres- 
ent and  future,  and  who  inspire  us.  From  usual  suspects  like  Laura  Flanders  and  Howard  Zinn, 
to  not-so-well  known  artists  and  activists  like  Betita  Martinez  and  John  K.  Samson,  these  are 
individuals  we  have  learned  from  and  hope  that  you  will  too. 

Musician  and  activist  Ian  MacKaye  graces  the  cover,  and  we've  featured  a  new  interview  with  him 
among  all  of  the  old  favorites.  We  thought  it  was  particularly  fitting  because  this  year  is  also  a 
milestone  for  Ian  and  his  record  label,  Dischord  Records.  They  are  celebrating  25  years  of  making 
music,  creating  community,  and  bringing  people  together  It  is  inspiring  to  us  to  know  that  oth- 
ers share  our  vision  and  that  they  are  steadfast  in  their  faith.  It  is  absolutely  the  whole  point  of 
Clamor  to  foster  this  same  community,  to  lead  by  example,  and  to  encourage  others. 

All  this  self-reflection  has  helped  us  see  that  our  path  for  the  future  is  clear,  that  we  are  needed 
now  more  than  ever  to  bring  you  these  stories  of  how  people  are  making  their  own  paths  in  the 
world.  But  we  also  know  that  there  are  challenges  ahead.  Selecting  these  interviews  led  our  edito- 
rial staff  into  serious  discussions  about  diversity  and  representation,  how  we  make  selections  for 
interview  subjects  and  interviewers,  who  our  artists  and  authors  are  and  what  perspectives  we 
are  trying  to  present.  This  can  only  mean  better  things  for  us  in  the  future,  but  we  hope  that  you, 
the  reader,  will  let  us  know  how  you  think  we  are  doing.  Five  years  of  work  have  taught  us  a  lot 
about  change  and  growth,  and  we  know  we  have  a  long  road  ahead  of  us. 

Please  keep  in  mind  that  all  independent  media  needs  you  to  survive.  Elsewhere  in  this  issue  you'll 
find  information  on  how  to  contribute  articles  and  interviews,  and  how  to  support  us  through  your 
subscriptions.  We  hope  that  you  take  this  opportunity  to  subscribe  or  renew  your  subscription. 


Thanks  for  reading. 


^oiAaJi 


PS:  In  putting  together  this  issue,  we  decided  to  leave  all  the  interviews  unedited  to  retain  the 
historic  context  in  which  they  were  originally  printed. 


iiiifliiikviriii] 

Clamor's  mission  is  to  provide  a  media  outlet  that  reflects  the  reality  of  alternative  politics  and  culture  in  a  format 
that  IS  accessible  to  people  from  a  variety  of  backgrounds.  Clamor  exists  to  fill  the  voids  left  by  mainstream  media. 
We  recognize  and  celebrate  the  fact  that  each  of  us  can  and  should  participate  in  media,  politics,  and  culture.  We 
publish  writing  and  art  that  exemplify  the  value  we  place  on  autonomy,  creativity,  exploration,  and  cooperation. 
Clamor  is  an  advocate  of  progressive  social  change  through  active  creation  of  political  and  cultural  alternatives. 


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Fall  2005 


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five  years  of  interviews: 

04  Ian  MacKaye special  edition  interview 

10  Todd  Solondz  ..  special  edition  interview 

14  Howard  Zinn  Clamor  #l,Jan/Feb  2000 

18  Elizabeth  Martinez  Clamor  #6,  Dec/Jan  2001 

22  Christian  Parenti  Clamor  #9,  Jul/Aug  2001 

28  Boots  Riley  Clamor  #1 1,  Nov/Dec  2001 

32  Derrick  Jensen  Clamor#11,  Nov/Dec  2001 

36  Carol  Leigh  Clamor  #15,  Jul/Aug  2002 

40  Chuck  D  Clamor  #17,  Nov/Dec  2002 

44  DeadPrez   Clamor  #19,  Mar/Apr  2003 

48  Studs  Terkel  Clamor  #25,  Mar/Apr  2004 

52  Laura  Flanders  Clamor  #28,  Sep/Oct  2004 

56  John  K.  Samson  Clamor  #29,  Nov/Dec  2004 

60  Mike  Davis  Clamor#30,  Jan/Feb  2005 


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intervie    Eric  Zassenhaus 

photos  Amy  Farina 

an  exclusive  special  edition  mittivicw 

Digging  into  Ian  Mackaye 's  history  is  somewhat  like  running  through  a  chronology  of  punk  music  in  America —  with 
all  its  incarnations  and  factions,  and  its  longstanding  commitment  to  down-to-earth  sound  and  attitude.  From  his 
beginnings  in  the  early  DC  punk  band  the  Teen  Idles  to  the  birth  of  the  straightedge  movement  in  Minor  Threat,  to  the 
emergence  of  emocore,  heavily  influenced  by  his  short-lived  project.  Embrace,  Mackaye  has  been  on  the  forefront  of  US 
indy  music  and  culture.  In  more  recent  years,  Fugazi  —  the  band  he  began  in  1987  —  has  set  the  standard  for  political 
bands  the  world  over.  With  their  considered  lyrics  and  gritty,  sophisticated  sound,  and  their  penchant  to  use  their  fame  to 
benefit  local  charities  and  community  efforts,  they  are  one  of  the  few  bands  of  their  era  to  replace  angry  invective  with 
on-the-ground  action.  His  most  recent  project  with  drummer  and  vocalist  Amy  Farina,  The  Evens,  is  yet  another  departure 
^  a  spare,  sometimes  narcotic  collection  of  melodies  that  skirt  the  boundaries  between  punk  and  folk. 

More  than  his  music,  though.  Mackaye  has  come  to  stand  for  an  ethical  strain  in  American  music  and  DI Y  culture  that 
remains  committed  to  changing  both  the  structure  of  the  music  industry,  and  American  society  at  large.  He's  been  roundly 
criticized  and  lauded  for  his  principled  (some  have  said  "puritanical")  stances  on  sex,  drugs,  rock  and  roll,  politics,  stage 
antics,  etc.  You  name  it,  he's  probably  been  both  attacked  and  applauded  for  it.  Throughout,  he's  maintained  an  image  of 
gruff,  hardworking  commitment  to  his  ideals,  and  with  over  25  years  in  the  punk  movement,  he's  managed  to  rack  up  a 
series  of  legends  and  lore  that  put  some  John  Henry  stories  to  shame. 

Dischord  Records,  the  label  he  helped  found  in  the  early  '80s,  remains  one  of  the  longest-standing,  truly  independent 
labels  out  there,  and  has  had  an  influence  on  music  extending  far  beyond  its  resources.  And  unlike  most  labels.  Dischord 
operates  on  a  model  antithetical  to  the  majority  of  conglomerate-owned  recording  companies,  sharing  costs  and  profits 
equally  with  the  artists  it  produces,  and  eschewing  contracts  in  favor  of  an  open  and  equal  agreements.  Dischord's  now 
sailing  towards  its  25th  anniversary.  For  a  label  up  against  the  monoliths  of  the  modern  recording  industry,  who  control 
much  of  the  distribution  and  have  tremendous  weight  in  determining  what  listeners  hear,  such  a  thing  is  a  major  distinc- 
tion. It  wouldn't  at  all  be  a  stretch  to  say  that  many  companies  covet  the  label's  rep  for  authentic,  down-to-earth  sound  and 
style.  As  if  to  highlight  Dischord's  underdog  status,  and  their  own  position  as  a  multinational  wholly  above-the-law,  Nike 
recently  launched  an  ad  campaign  blatantly  ripping  off  the  cover  of  the  Minor  Threat's  1983  Discography  without  bother- 
ing to  ask  permission.  As  we  went  to  press,  Nike  had  just  rescinded  the  campaign  and  issued  an  apology. 

I  met  up  with  Mackaye  at  a  bar  within  a  bookstore  in  downtown  DC,  amid  the  chatter  of  shoppers  and  the  barking  of 
a  PA  system,  at  what  I  initially  thought  was  an  ironic  place  to  be  meeting  one  of  the  principal  founders  of  the  anti-alcohol 
straightedge  movement.  What  I  came  to  realize  quickly  is  that  Mackaye's  ideas  are  far  more  elastic  and  more  nuanced  than 
they're  often  given  credit  for.  At  43.  with  a  backlog  of  history  that  threatens  to  overwhelm  his  current  projects,  Mackaye 
continues  to  experiment  with  the  boundaries  between  music,  social  action,  and  community,  rethinking  the  ways  in  which 
they  interact  and  their  possibilities  for  the  future. 


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One  thing  I  've  always  been  curious  about  is  how  Dischord  differs  from 
major  label  producers  in  terms  oj  how  they  deal  with  artists. 

Tm  not  intimately  acquainted  with  how  anybody  else  runs  their  opera- 
lion,  so  1  can't  really  give  you  a  comparative  analysis.  What  1  can  tell 
you  is  that  Dischord  continues  to  operate  using  no  contracts.  Artists 
are  not  bound  by  contracts.  Artists  continue  to  own  their  own  music. 
We  don't  possess  the  tapes;  we  don't  own  them.  A  lot  of  labels  actu- 
ally, it's  common  practice  that  they'll  own  them,  or  those  versipns. 
Our  royalties  are  50/50  split  of  the  profts.  So  profit-sharing.  Most  la- 
bels, or  many  labels,  certainly  the  bigger  ones  —  yeah,  1  think  all 
labels  —  operate  on  a  royalty-based  payments.  So  every  record  that 
gets  sold  at  a  certain  percentage  of  blah  blah,  there's  a  royalty.  So  if 
you  sell  so  many  records  you  get  per-record,  this  much.  But  it's  a  little 
bit,  it's  more  complicated  because  there's  sort  of  "discount  records' 
and  'promo  records'.  All  these  diflferent  levels-  it's  very  complicated. 
The  way  that  we  approach  it  is  straight  profit-sharing.  In  other  words, 
if  a  record  costs  SI 000  —  no  record  costs  $1000  to  make.  Let's  say 
it  costs  $5000  to  make.  That  means  the  recording  and  the  pressing, 
everything,  all  in,  it's  $5000  —  which  is  still  a  very  low  figure  now. 
Let's  say  we  sell  records  and  the  total  income  from  the  sales  of  that 
record  are  $10000.  If  we  get  $5000,  half  of  it  goes  to  the  artist.  Straight 
profit  sharing. 

So  it 's  kind  of  like  you  're  being  contracted  to  do  production  and 
distribution  ... 

In  a  sense,  yeah.  Although  distro  is  consignment  usually.  They  usually 
work  on  a  consignment  deal;  they  don't  work  on  a  profit-share.  In  other 
words,  distro  usually  they're  buying  stuff —  I'm  actually  not  sure  how 
these  other  operations  work,  so  I  can't  actually  say.  What  1  can  say  is 
that,  if  a  record  goes  into  a  loss,  we  generally  assume  100%  of  the 
loss.  So  there's  no  risk  to  the  band.  They're  not  going  to  pay  us.  But 
it  also  means  that  the  record  is  being  made.  That  we  obviously  know 
how  things  work,  and  we're  not  going  to  let  a  band  spend  $20,000  on 
a  record  that's  only  going  to  generate  $10,000  of  income.  It's  just  so 
clear.  I  think  that-  I  don't  know  if  you  know  this.  If  you  look  in  this 
week's  City  Paper,  there's  a  piece  in  there  about  one  of  the  bands  on 
Dischord  who've  tried  to  apply  to  the  Art's  Council  of  DC  for  a  grant 
to  pay  for  the  recording.  I  haven't  read  the  piece,  but  as  I  understand  it, 
they're  somewhat  critical,  saying  that  labels  never  give  bands  enough 
money  to  record.  The  fact  is,  we  understand  the  economy  of  records. 
And  how  much,  if  you  sell  records,  how  much  it  costs  to  make,  how 
much  you're  selling  them  for,  and  the  money  they're  generating.  It's 
insane  to  make  something,  to  spend  money,  like,  $10000  on  a  record 
that's  only  going  to  make  $3000.  It  doesn't  make  any  sense. 

So  if  you  get  one  hit  a  year,  it  pays  for  all  the  rest? 

Weil,  that's  the  way  the  major  labels  operate.  I'm  talking  about  the 

way  we  operate.  We  have  a  budget  in  terms  of  how  bands,  w  hen 

they  record,  it's  about  3500  to  4000  dollars  recording  budget.  And 

what  that  means  —  and  this  is  what  I  think  makes  us  unique  to  many 

other  labels  —  is  that  most  labels,  as  I  understand  it,  the  origination 

—  which  is  the  recording,  the  artwork,  that  stuff —  they  may  put  the 

money  up  for  it.  but  it's  entirely  recuperable.  In  other  words,  all  of  that 

money  comes  otTthe  top  of  the  artist  royalties,  so  the  anists  spend  say 

$5000  recording.  The  won't  see  royalties  until  they've  made  $5000 

in  royalties.  Sec  what  I'm  saying?  The  money  may  be  fronted  by  the 

label,  but  it's  coming  out  of  the  artist's  pocket.  In  our  case,  we  put  in 

o     an  o\crhead  on  the  project.  We'll  say  okay.  $4()()()  for  the  recording. 

rg     That  means  S2000  we're  paymg  for,  and  $2000  you're  paying.  It's 

5     50/50.  We  put  the  cost  against  the  project.  So  that  $4000  goes  into  the 

^     project,  so  when  the  project  breaks  even,  then  we  go  into  profit.  So 

%     wc  share  the  cost  of  recording,  and  we  share  the  cost  of  the  art.  and 


all  that  stuff.  So  I  think  what  makes  us  unique  —  I  think  most  labels, 
actually,  charge  all  of  that  back  to  the  artist.  But  because  we  do  this, 
we  have  to  keep  control  over  the  prices  of  what  we're  spending  on 
things,  because  the  band  will  spend  way  too  much  money.  There's  a 
trend,  a  kind  of  conceit,  that  you  cant  make  a  good  record  for  less  than 
$10,000.  It's  insane.  It's  totally  insane.  Some  of  the  greatest  records 
ever  made  were  made  for  $100. 

So  do  you  think  yours  is  a  more  sustainable  model  than  most  other 
labels? 

I  don't  know.  I'm  not  a  comparative  guy.  What  I  can  tell  you  is  that  in 
December  it  will  be  the  twenty-fifth  anniversary  of  the  label.  You  tell 
me  if  it's  sustainable.  We  never  had  a  year  that  was  deeply  in  the  red. 
We  had  a  couple  kind  of  sketchy  years.  I  have  four  relatively  full-time 
employees  and  one  or  two  part  time  employees.  The  full  time  employ- 
ees all  have  health  care,  they  all  get  benefits.  They're  not  getting  rich 
off  of  us.  but  it's  well  more  than  minimum  wage  and  it's  a  straight 
up  deal.  In  my  mind,  it's  a  totally  workable  model.  One  of  the  ways 
that  we've  operated  that  has  made  this  possible  is  that  we  don't  have 
lawyers  and  we  don't  use  contracts.  If  you  don't  use  contracts,  you 
don't  need  lawyers. 

You  've  never  gotten  into  a  legal  battle  before? 

No.  Actually,  there  was  one  time  we  got  into  a  legal  battle.  You  have 
to  understand  something  about  me  personally.  The  only  time  a  lawyer 
is  relevant  or  when  a  contract  becomes  rele\ant  as  a  piece  of  paper  be- 
comes a  point  of  order  is  when  someone  goes  to  court.  I  would  never 
go  to  court  over  money,  because  from  my  point  of  \  iew.  at  that  point, 
it's  like.  "Have  it.  Just  take  it.  Whatever  you  want  you  can  have."  If 
somebody's  that  unhappy,  or  they  feel  that  distrusting  of  me.  or  the 
label,  I  don't  want  them  to  feel  that  way.  I'd  want  them  to  go  some- 
where else.  Straight  up.  I  gotta  say  that,  at  this  point,  if  there  ever  was 
any  kind  of  legal  situation  where  we  were  to  loose,  let's  sa\.  a  lawsuit, 
the  amount  of  money  —  in  my  mind  —  the  most  amount  of  money  I 
can  imagine  somebody  suing  us  for,  would  already  have  been  saved 
by  not  having  a  lawyer  on  retainer  for  the  last  twcnt\  years.  I'm  just 
not  interested  in  any  of  that.  I'm  not  interested  in  litigation,  and  I'm 
definitely  not  attracted  to  the  kind  of  energy  that  goes  behind  litiga- 
tion. The  one  legal  situation  we  had  came  in  the  mid-90s.  We  reissued 
a  band  called  Scream  —  an  early  DC  hardcore  band  from  1982  —  we 
put  their  records  out.  Two  or  three  records.  In  the  early  90s  we  started 
to  release  the  vinyl  on  CD.  It  was  just  a  reissue,  basically  makmg  those 
records  available  in  a  diflercnt  format.  The  drummer  of  Scream  was 
Dave  Grohl.  He  was  one  of  the  two  drummers  for  the  band,  and  he  was 
later  the  dmmmer  for  Nirvana. 

Somehow,  the  major  labels  got  whitTof  this.  It  turned  out  that 
a  label  called  Holl>\\ood  records  had  been  getting  readv  to  relea.se 
a  band  that  they'd  signed  to  their  label  called  "The  Scream."  so  they 
sent  us  a  cease  and  desist  saying  "hey.  vou  can't  put  this  record  out." 
We'd  already  made  the  CD.  It  was  alreadv  made.  I  said,  "well  it's 
already  made.  We're  putting  it  out."  This  is  just  a  reissue  of  a  band 
that  has  only  sold  a  couple  thousand  copies.  It's  nothmg.  They  said. 
"Yeah,  but  you  have  to  understand,  we  spend  half  a  million  dollars 
on  promotions,  all  this  kind  of  stuiT.  There's  going  to  be  confusion  to 
the  consumer."  I  said.  ""Well.  I  don't  think  it"s  going  to  be  that  confus- 
ing. We're  at  Dischord;  we  don't  have  any  access  to  any  of  the  chain 
stores.  You're  records  are  chain  store  records.  There  just  isn't  going  to 
be  an  issue."  The  guy  said.  "'Well,  it's  going  to  be  an  issue,  and  really. 
I  think  you  should  seriouslv  consider  putting  a  sticker  on  your  records 
saying  "Scream  from  DC.  '  .And  I  said.  ""Well,  first  otT.  we've  already 
made  the  records.  I'm  not  going  to  re-do  it  or  pay  to  have  a  sticker 
put  on.  "  I  said.  "We're  not  concerned  about  the  confusion,  and  wc 
don't  mind  the  fact  that  you  have  basicallv  named  a  band  that  people 


NO 


may  get  confused  with  our  band.  That's  fine  with  us.  But  if  you're 
concerned,  then  I  feel  liice,  you  can  go  ahead  and  put  a  sticicer  on 
yours  saying  'This  is  The  Scream  from  LA.'  He  says.  "I  really  think 
you  should  reconsider."  And  I  said,  "Frankly,  since  our  band  predated 
your  band  by  a  decade,  and  this  is  a  reissue  of  a  band  that's  not  even 
together  anymore,  if  anything,  therefore  the  onus  is  on  you."  He  said, 
"You  might  be  right  about  that,  but  let  me  explain  something  to  you. 
Hollywood  Records  is  a  division  of  Disney.  Disney  has  a  huge  legal 
wing."  He  says,  "We  will  sue  you.  And  you  may  be  right,  but  you'll 
never  be  proved  right,  because  you'll  be  bankrupt  before  you  ever  get 
there."  I  said,  "Alrighty  then."  And  I  called  up  a  friend  of  mine  who's 
a  lawyer-dude  and  I  say,  "what  should  1  do?"  He  wanted  to  threaten  to 
sue  them  for  triple  damages.  I  said,  "Whoa  whoa  whoa.  I'm  not  going 
to  get  into  this."  Because  lawyers  like  to  fight.  Are  you  a  lawyer? 

Me?  No. 

They  love  to  fight.  So  1  said.  "No  no  no."  We  did  some  research.  It 
turned  out  that  not  only  did  they  not  have  the  right  to  say  that  to  us. 
obviously,  but  they  didn't  have  the  copyright  or  the  trademark  to  the 
name.  They  applied  for  it,  but  someone  else  already  had  it.  In  any 
event,  it  all  went  away.  In  doing  the  research,  it  ended  up  costing  mc 
like  $500,  because  the  band  The  Scream  ended  up  changing  their 
name,  and  then  they  broke  up.  The  record  never  even  came  out.  After 
that  1  was  like,  you  know  what,  I'm  just  not  going  to  get  into  it.  I've 
just  never  had  a  legal  issue.  'Cause  if  a  band's  unhappy,  as  I  said,  they 
can  have  their  record. 


So  it  seems  like,  obviously,  it's  more  about  maintaining  a  community  ■■. 

Of  course.  I  mean  the  idea  is  if  you  do  something  organically,  then 
you  continue  to  do  it  organically.  The  American  business  model  seems 
to  be  totally  based  on  growth  —  you  always  have  to  grow.  I  disagree 
with  that.  The  American  business  model  holds  that  you  should  charge 
what  the  market  will  bear.  I  don't  agree  with  that.  It's  just  so  clear  to 
me.  And  people  can  say  what  they  want. . .  I  may  not  be  filthy  rich,  but 
I'm  well-off.  I'm  fine,  and  I  feel  like  the  label  has  been  solvent  for 
over  two  decades.  It  just  goes  on.  I  used  to  think  that,  say  if  I  was  a 
baker,  you  make  a  recipe  for  bread.  You  start  baking  it.  People  like  it, 
they'll  keep  buying  it.  You  keep  making  it,  they  keep  buying.  You're 
nurturing  a  community,  right?  It  never  occurred  to  me  that  you're  sup- 
posed to  sell  the  bakery.  It  just  didn't  occur  to  me.  I  didn't  know.  I 
never  went  to  college,  so  1  don't  think  1  ever  got  the  poison.  Seriously, 
i  don't  think  1  ever  got  that  poison  that  everything  is  for  sale.  For  me, 
Dischord  has  never  been  for  sale. 

/  think  there 's  developed  this  sort  of  mystique  around  Ian  MacKaye 
—  a  kind  of  mythology.  1  know  it's  something  you  're  conscious  of.  Is  it 
what  you  want  it  to  be'? 

1  don't  have  any  control  over  it.  And  1  don't  know  if  you  want  me  to 
"set  the  record  straight."  The  record  can  never  be  set  straight  because 
my  work  all  the  sudden  becomes  fodder  for  other  people's  agendas. 
For  instance,  before  there  was  ever  a  straightedge  movement,  there 
was  a  bent-edge  movement.  In  1983,  when  Minor  Threat  was  on  tour, 


4 


o 
o 


o 

o 


there  was  no  straightedge  movement.  I  never  used  that  term,  but  we 
played  other  cities  around  the  country,  and  people  would  come  and  say 
they  were  part  of  the  'bent-edge'  movement.  Reactionaries. 

Bent  edge? 

B-E-N-T.  Bent.  Straightedge/  bentedge  —  round-edge,  curved-cdgc. 
All  these  kind  of  "edges".  They  were  oppositional  movements  to  a 
movement  that  didn't  exist.  So  the  point  being  that  -  -  I  feel  it's  point- 
less to  try  to  set  the  record  straight,  it's  insane.  It  got  to  a  point  in  my 
life  also  when  I  was  in  my  late  thirties,  and  I  had  all  these  people  ask- 
ing me  if  I  was  still  'straight'.  The  real  question  is  'what  if  I  wasn't?' 
That's  what  I  want  to  know.  It's  irrelevant,  ultimately,  what  I  do  with 
my  life.  What's  relevant  is  what  people  do  with  their  lives.  People 
have  to  learn  how  to  trust  themselves,  and  not  to  be  so  concerned  w  ith 
my  affairs,  to  be  more  concerned  with  theirs.  In  terms  of  the  mythol- 
ogy about  me,  I'm  very  aware  of  it.  But  I  can't  let  it  distract  me  too 
much  from  my  work. 

How  do  you  think  your  opinions  have  evolved.  It  sounds  like  you  've 
gone  through  all  these  grand  changes,  aesthetic  movements,  whatever, 
that  have  gelled  into  these  musical  and  kind  of  life  philosophies.  What 
do  you  — 

I  don't  know.  I  guess  I  don't  see  it  that  way.  I  just  make  music.  I  don't 
understand.  When  1  think  about  emocore  and  so  forth,  that  kind  of  stuff, 
I  have  no  idea  what  that  is.  I'm  not  trying  to  be  disrespectful,  but  from 
my  point  of  view,  it  was  always  just  punk  rock.  And  even  though  people 
often  cited  Embrace  or  Rites  of  Spring  or  bands  from  that  era  as  being 
inspirational  or  kind  of  the  progenitors  of  that  movement,  I've  never 
thought  about  it  like  that.  I  just  made  songs.  That's  what  we  were  doing 
that  day.  I  am  committed  to  fucking  with  the  form.  I  think  that's  what 
you're  supposed  to  do.  You're  supposed  to  think  about  stuff,  you  want 
people  to  engage  in  stuff,  real  time.  We're  trying  to  create  something 
people  will  gather  around.  I  have  thoughts  about  that  gathering,  but  I  do 
think  that  this  society  now,  what  has  gone  into  deep  decline  in  the  last 
twenty  or  thirty  years,  is  that  people  don't  congregate.  Increasingly  I 
think  we've  become  more  and  more  isolated.  Because  of  that,  it  makes 
organization  and  organizing  much  more  difficult.  I  think  most  people 
in  this  country  —  in  fact,  I  would  say  everyone  —  is  opposed  to  war, 
period.  It's  just  that  they  don't  know  what  war  is  because  something 
hasn't  blown  up  in  their  backyard.  I  think  if  something  blew  up  in  their 
backyard  they'd  be  like,  "we  don't  want  that."  I  think  everyone  in  this 
country  really  is  opposed  to  war.  Even  them  dudes  who  are  making  all 
the  money,  if  they  dropped  one  of  their  bombs  on  their  house,  they'd  be 
opposed  to  it.  But  beyond  that,  I  think  by  and  large,  people  who  live  in 
this  particular  designated  nation  —  what  I  mean  by  that  is  the  line  that 
has  been  drawn  around  us  that  somehow  makes  us  into  a  nation  —  the 
people  in  this  country  do  not  want  to  be  killing  other  human  beings. 
Period.  All  it  means  is  that  we've  been  divided  in  a  way  that  it  makes  it 
very  difficult  to  get  enough  of  a  consensus,  so  in  what  we  can  we  regu- 
larly gather?  In  what  ways  can  we  do  it'.'  Well,  one  idea,  one  place  that 
people  do  gather,  is  for  music.  One  of  the  few  regular  community-^kind 
of  gatherings.  So  the  idea  is  to  make  music  where  people  will  gather, 
and  they  can  talk  to  each  other  —  it's  not  blaring  the  whole  time  —  to 
make  them  feel  like  they're  part  of  something.  It's  not  a  coincidence 
that  many,  many  radically  politically  minded  people  come  out  of  music 
scenes.  It's  not  a  coincidence.  It's  because  they  have  been  made  in  a 
community  that  allows  for  communication  outside  of  what  the  media 
makes  room  for.  Straight  up.  Music  is  a  gathering  point.  That's  my 
point.  You  fuck  with  the  fonn,  to  get  people's  focus  back  on  music. 

But  is  that  enough?  Especially  right  now.  Is  it  enough  to  create  a  com- 
munity of  people  into  the  same  .sounds  when  the  Right  wing  is  so  adept 
at  actually,  radically  altering  things? 


Well,  they  have  churches.  Is  it  enough?  Well,  it's  more  than  nothing. 
I  don't  know.  Imagine  if  there  were  ten  thousand  people  starring,  and 
let's  say  that  you  and  I  were  like,  "alright,  we're  going  to  make  bread." 
So  we  make  some  bread.  Is  it  enough  for  10000  star\ing  people?  No. 
But  goddamn,  if  a  few  other  people  would  come  join  us.  we  might  be 
able  to  help  out,  and  we'd  certainly  be  able  to  feed  somebody.  I'm  just 
doing  a  part.  I  have  to  say,  one  thing  about  the  political  situation  right 
now:  It's  weather. 

//  s  weather? 

You  almost  can't  avoid  it.  The  machinery's  so  huge.  It's  weather. 
We're  in  a  storm,  we're  in  a  flood,  were  in  a  draught.  We're  in  a 
destructive  time.  But,  it's  gonna  go  away.  It  has  to  go  away.  They're 
going  to  snuff  themselves  out.  They  have  to.  You  know  that  dont 
you?  Power  corrupts.  Absolute  power  corrupts  absolutely.  Histori- 
cally, I  think  any  despotic  leadership  has  ended  their  own  reign  in 
some  way.  They  always  snuff  themselves  out.  Always.  From  my 
mind,  that  doesn't  mean  that  people  should  sit  back  at  all.  It  ju.st 
means  that  you  shouldn't  feel  like  there's  no  point  in  working  be- 
cause if  you  don't  do  something  big  enough  to  knock  them  out  it's 
not  worth  doing.  Of  course,  anything  that  u  e  do  is  good.  The  fact 
that  you're  writing  for  this  magazine  is  good.  The  fact  that  you  think 
about  it  —  I  assume  you  think  about  it  —  the  fact  that  anybody 
even  thinks  about  the  political  situation  already  puts  them  well  ahead 
of  most  of  society,  in  terms  of  work.  Just  thinking  about  it.  Am  I 
directly  feeding  somebody?  No.  By  making  music  and  celebrating 
and  supporting  the  people  who  do?  Yes.  It's  linkage.  I'm  just  doing 
my  work.  I  think  that  Fugazi  was  always  clear  about  that.  In  this 
city,  in  Washington  DC,  every  gig  from  1989  on,  we  plaved  either  a 
benefit  or  a  free  show.  We  never  got  paid  c\er  for  a  show  we  played 
in  this  city.  Our  thought  was,  either  we're  making  music  for  people 
to  celebrate  for  free,  outdoor  show  s,  or  we're  doing  benefits  to  raise 
money  for  people  who're  on  the  front  lines  of  organizations  doing 
good  work.  That's  our  work.  That's  how  we  can  contribute. 

I  was  listening  to  this  NPR  interview  I  did  earlier  this  morning, 
and  I  was  just  laughing  out  loud  at  some  of  it.  The  interviewer  was 
saying  "All  These  Governors"  is  a  song  about  ineffective  government. 
It's  not  a  song  about  ineffective  government  at  all.  It's  a  song  about 
overly  effective  government.  On  a  car,  you  have  a  go%emor,  and  that 
keeps  the  car  from  going  beyond  a  certain  speed.  And  1  was  thinking 
about  that  fact  that  essentially,  that's  w hat  governments  do.  They  keep 
the  population  from  progressing  beyond  a  certain  point.  They  tamp 
us  down,  they  keep  control.  That's  what  a  go\emment  is.  They  gov- 
ern. It's  effective.  It's  extremely  effective.  She  heard  the  lyric.  "When 
things  that  should  work  don't  work,  that's  the  word  of  all  these  gover- 
nors". She  was  hearing  it  like,  they  weren't  doing  a  good  job  getting 
these  things  to  work.  What  I'm  saying  is.  that  things  that  obviously 
should  work  like  community  involvement,  benevolence,  generosity, 
political  correctness  —  things  that  should  work  but  don't  work.  If 
they're  not  working,  it's  because  the  government  doesn't  want  it  to 
work. 

So  essentially  there's  a  heaurocracy  to  keep  things  not  working? 

Right.  I'm  not  saving  that  there's  a  boardroom  where  all  these  guys 
sitting  around  making  these  things  up  But  I  am  saying  is  that  w  ithin 
the  nature  of  our  society,  we've  allowed  this  to  happen.  Think  about 
the  term  'political  correctness'.  'Correct'  as  I  understand  it  meant 
right'.  But  yet  it's  considered  an  insult.  To  be  politically  correct  is  a 
bad  thing  to  be.  That's  insanity.  That  was  the  Reagan  revolution  at  its 
purest  essence. 

I  feel  like  we're  going  through  a  Reagan  revolution  on  ste- 
roids. Their  grabbing  of  language  and  twisting  it  in  a  way  that 
has  been  helped  and  honed  b>  advertising  campaigns  and  the  PR 


1 


fie 


V/A  lake  Penacilin  Now  CD 

FEATURING:  Swallowing  Shit  •  warsawpack  | 

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Submission  Hold  •  Greg  MacPtierson  Band 
Propagandhi  •  Mico  •  Randy  •  ...  But  Alive 
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Hiretsukan  •  The  (International)  Noise  Conspiracy 
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about  what  you  care  about,  it  might  become  subject  to  examination. 
And  then  maybe  you'd  be  ridiculed  since  it's  uncooi  to  care.  But  I 
fucking  care. 

So  it's  really  just  about  creating  that's  for  community  and  furthering, 
for  lack  of  a  better  word,  an  activist  community...  Do  you  feel  it's 
more  about  supporting  these  various  organizations  than  in  actually 
creating  music? 

For  me  music  is  central.  Music  is  sacred.  I  don't  have  a  choice  in 
the  matter;  1  have  to  make  it.  It's  music  1  wake  up  with  and  I  go  to 
bed  with  everyday  of  my  life.  I'm  inspired  by  it.  It  goes  on  and  on. 
I  understand  that  there  are  those  who  think  music  is  trite,  but  I  think 
that  their  outlook  has  been  heavily  colored  by  the  way  the  music  in- 
dustry works.  The  music  industry  is  very  interested  in  people  thinking 
of  music  as  trite  or  just  entertainment,  because  they're  in  the  business 
of  selling  it.  And  if  something  is  sacred,  and  they're  selling  it,  you 
wouldn't  need  to  buy  two.  If  you  could  buy  a  record  that  means  so 
much  to  you  that's  all  you  want  to  hear,  you're  not  going  to  buy  the 
record  that  comes  out  the  next  day. 

Music  was  around  before  anything  else  practically.  How  could  it 
be  entertainment?  Do  you  think  that  the  initial  musicians  were  enter- 
taining people?  I  don't  think  so.  They  were  communicating.  Have  you 
ever  seen  Bruce  Springsteen  or  somebody  say  something  political, 
and  someone  else  will  critique  him  going,  "What  does  he  know  about 
politics.  He's  just  a  musician."?  I  would  counter  by  saying,  "What  the 
fuck  does  the  White  House  know?  They're  just  businessmen.  They're 
not  politicians."  They're  businessmen.  It's  clear.  It's  so  interesting  that 
musicians  are  ridiculed.  But  people  who  are  clearly,  solely  interested 
in  profit,  and  profit  for  themselves,  are  taken  seriously  when  they  start 
talking  about  issues  of  the  public  health  and  will.  It's  insane.  Music  is 
no  fucking  joke. 

There  must  be  a  little  bit  of  a  clash  between  making  this  music  and 
also  running  a  pretty  well  established  label  that  is  basically  concerned 
with  the  mechanics  of  the  production... 

To  some  degree,  yeah.  People  say,  "well,  if  you  hate  it  so  much,  why 
do  you  have  a  label?"  Well,  I  have  a  label  because  I  hate  it  so  much. 
It's  so  obvious.  Making  records  is  not  an  evil  thing.  I  have  records.  I 
listen  to  music  all  the  time.  But  how  it's  being  sold,  who's  selling  it,  all 
these  kind  of  things,  I  am  thoughtful  about  that.  I  understand  that  it's 


t  the  Gap  or  somebody  like  that 

ntrol  the  initial  salvo,  the  spirit 

spirit  in  which  the  record  was 

f  I  had  signed  to  another  label,  I 

ly  I  have  a  label. 

ing  a  label  and  simultaneously 
\ering  how  you  balance  having  a 
[responsibilities.  It  would  seem 
'  easy  lifestyle  if  you  wanted. 

ifestyle.  I  just  do  what  I  do.  I'm 
as  leisure.  I  actually  like  to  be 
g  to  people.  I  don't  have  a  press 
'm  interested  in  that.  It's  a  pro- 
cings.  I  like  it.  I  don't  want  to  be 
el  places  where  I  have  a  reason 
^aybe  in  my  lifetime  I'll  change, 
here  I  say,  "you  know,  I'm  tired 
nk  that  people  have  been  largely 
a  bunch  of  money  and  then  you 
"uck  else  is  life  but  doing  some- 
pposed  to  be  here  on  the  planet 
for?  Who  doesn't  want  to  do  something?  It's  insanity.  And  everyone 
just  wants  to  go  golfing  or  something?  I  don't  understand  it  at  all. 
I'm  not  trying  to  say  nothing  bad  about  golfing.  I  think  it's  crazy  that 
people  have  this  reward  system  in  their  minds.  This  idea  that  we  work 
hard  and  then  we  get  rewarded.  My  thinking  is,  work  for  free,  get  paid 
for  nothing.  Be  at  peace  with  being  happy  to  do  stuff.  I'm  happy  to  do 
stuff,  so  I  guess  I  don't  think  "I  wish  my  lifestyle  was  different.  I  think 
a  lot  of  people  think  it's  easy  for  me  to  talk  this  way  because  I  make  a 
living  from  my  music.  Correct  me  if  I'm  wrong.  I'm  not  playing  music 
right  now  am  I?  No,  I'm  not,  I'm  sitting  here  talking  to  you.  I  work 
all  the  time  on  the  label,  on  the  band.  That  is  not  my  music.  I  do  that 
work  so  that  I  can  play  music.  I'll  go  weeks  without  playing  music, 
and  that  is  very  difficult  for  me,  because  that's  the  kind  of  commitment 
I  have  to  my  music. 

It's  almost  like,  music-playing  as  a  metaphor  for  living  your  life... 

It  is.  It  definitely  is.  I  have  to  say,  I'm  emphatic  about  musjc,  but  I 
don't  want  people  to  think  that  I  think  that  everyone  should  play  mu- 
sic. I  don't  think  that.  I  think  everyone  should  follow  their  heart,  think 
about  whatever  calls  them,  and  do  it.  There  are  so  many  people  that 
think.  "I  wanna  be  an  artist,  but  I  can't  make  a  living  at  it."  Don't  make 
art  for  a  living.  Make  art  because  you  have  to.  Figure  out  other  ways 
to  make  a  living.  When  I  play  a  show,  I'm  not  thinking,  "Oh,  good, 
now  I  can  pay  my  rent."  I'm  thinking,  "God  damn,  we're  all  here.  And 
we're  gonna  make  some  music  together.  Me,  Amy,  and  all  the  people 
in  this  room.  We're  gonna  some  music  together.  What  a  great  way 
to  spend  time."  Chuck  Dukowsky  at  Black  Flag  did  an  interview  in 
1980  where  he  said  he'd  rather  work  a  day  job  for  the  rest  of  his  life 
than  ever  become  solely  dependent  on  his  music  to  live.  When  I  read 
that  article  I  felt,  "that  is  exactly  the  way  I  feel,  too."  And  that's  why 
I  work.  Straight  up.  ir 

Eric  Zassenfiaus  is  the  Culture  Editor  for  Clamor  and  co-editor  of  In- 
stant Cit}':  A  Literary  Exploration  of  San  Francisco  (www.instantcity. 
org).  Email  him  at  eric@clamormagazine.org. 


o 
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« 


todd  solondz 


interview  Tony  DuShane 
an  exclusive  special  edition  interview 


You  want  to  be  a  talk  show  host  like  David  Letterman.  You  teach  English  to  Russian  immigrants.  You  have  a  fantasy 
of  being  raped.  You  drug  your  son's  friend  and  have  sex  with  him.  You're  a  character  in  a  Todd  Solondz  film. 

Todd  Solondz  has  created  unique  feature  films  with  vibrant  characters  that  don't  fit  so  well  into  normal  society.  His 
current  film.  "Palindromes,"  follows  Aviva,  a  13-  year-old  girl  bent  on  getting  pregnant  and  having  a  baby  at  any 
cost.  Aviva  is  played  by  seven  different  actors  including  Jennifer  Jason  Leigh.  It's  a  fairy  tale  ala  Gulliver's  Travels 
with  abortion,  pedophilia,  a  Christian  rock  band,  and  a  beautiful  girl  with  no  arms  who  can  sing  her  guts  out. 

I  met  Todd  Solondz  in  his  hotel  room  the  day  before  he  was  appearing  at  the  San  Francisco  International  Film  Fes- 
tival last  May  as  part  of  an  indie  filmmaking  seminar  and  screening  of  "Palindromes"  co-presented  by  826  Valencia, 
a  writing  lab  for  young  students  headed  by  writer  Dave  Eggers. 


What  lessons  have  you  learned  regarding  filmmaking  or  things  you  've 
done  differently  as  you  've  progressed  with  each  film? 

It's  a  good  question.  It's  a  problematic  one  to  answer  though.  There 
are  no  real  lessons  that  I've  learned  that  I  feel  I  can  communicate 
or  convey  to  others.  It's  hard  to  articulate  what  exactly  you've  ab- 
sorbed from  any  of  this.  You  do  grow  with  each  film  that  you  make 
and  you  have  a  better  understanding,  a  grasp,  a  sense  of  storytelling 
and  of  what  moviemaking  is  about.  But  it's  the  kind  of  experience 
that  in  some  sense  is  almost  subconsciously  understood,  so  there- 
fore, if  it's  to  be  understood  at  all.  it's  not  something  that  I  have 
any  lessons  that  1  can  pass  onto  others.  I'm  still  figuring  it  all  out 
myself  The  process  of  filmmaking  is  both  one  of  discovery  and 
self-discovery.  It's  a  mystery  what  makes  one  put  pen  to  paper.  It's 
not  exactly  fun.  And,  so  what  I  find  happens,  I  write  a  first  draft, 
I  have  a  sense  of  what  it  is.  Of  course  I  really  don't  know  what  it 
is.  When  I  start  shooting,  I  have  the  actors  in  the  locations  and  it 
takes  on  a  different  life  and  I  say.  "Ah.  so  this  is  what  it  is."  But 
then  you  get  into  the  cutting  room  and  yet  again  it  shifts  in  mean- 
ing, you  find  from  shaving  away,  from  distilling,  from  finding  the 


right  form,  you  get  at  what  you  think  is  the  meaning  of  this  movie. 

What  are  the  joys  and  frustrations  you  've  found  working  with 
child  actors? 

Well,  generally  speaking,  children  are  easier  to  direct  than  adults.  They 
respond  more  readily  to  direction.  But,  there  are  all  kinds  of  kids, 
some  that  are  truly  gifted,  and  need  little  in  the  way  of  modification, 
and  others  that  need  a  lot  more  attention  and  even  line  readings.  I've 
dealt  with  children  in  all  of  my  movies  that  have  contained  delicate 
material,  and  I've  always  involved  the  families,  the  parents,  so  it  be- 
comes a  much  more  lengthy  process.  The  casting  process  with  chil- 
dren, you  have  to  be  very  open  and  straight-forward  with  them,  so 
they  can  feel  and  have  a  sense  of  what  you're  about.  Because  what's 
of  paramount  importance  is  that  their  child  will  take  pride  and  have  a 
sense  of  dignity  in  their  participation  in  this  project.  The  parents  are 
always  there  on  set.  and  so  far.  they're  also  proud  of  the  work  that  they 
have  done.  I've  been  very  fortunate  that  way.  1  can  say  1  don't  have 
children,  but  if  I  did  have  a  child  and  my  child  were  clamoring  to  act. 
1  certainly  would  permit  my  child  to  act  in  one  of  my  movies  where  I 


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feel  a  certain  dignity  is  accorded  to  the  actor.  Whereas  I  would  never 
permit  my  child  to  act  in  a  commercial  for  AT&T  or  The  Gap,  or  de- 
tergent, or  some  sort  of  consumer  good  where  they're  functioning  as  a 
shill.  For  consumer  goods  or  some  sort  of  corporate  entity,  that  would 
be  for  me  the  obscenity. 

Thar  s  great  you  haven 't  nin  into  any  conflicts. 

No,  no,  so  long  as  I  don't  have  any  trouble  with  people  who  read  the 
material  and  say,  "I'm  sorry  it's  not  for  us,"  and  1  say  thank  you  and  i 
respect  that  decision.  The  only  problem  that  would  happen  is  if  they 
say,  "Yes.  we'll  do  this,"  and  then  they  get  on  the  set  and  they  change 
their  mind.  That's  never  happened,  but  that  would  be  the  one  terrible 
nightmare  that  could  take  place. 

Let  s  move  onto  Storytelling  and  the  sex  scene  in  Storytelling,  the  box 
covering  the  teacher  and  the  pupil  having  sex.  Was  that  an  artistic 
decision? 

It  takes  on  a  few  meanings  here.  When  I  shoot  a  movie,  I  don't  want  to 
have  to  alter  the  way  I  shoot  a  scene  because  of  the  way  I  imagine  the 
way  the  [Motion  Picture  Association  of  America]  would  respond  to  the 
material.  I  shoot  them  the  way  1  want  to  shoot  them  and  if  the  MPAA 
does  not  take  to  it,  then  I  would  put  it  in  my  contract  with  the  studio,  in 
order  to  procure  an  R-rating  I  would  be  allowed  to  incorporate  boxes 
and'or  beeps  to  satisfy  the  demands.  I  knew  this  was  unlikely  to  get  an 
R-rating,  just  from  the  script  itself  So  I  negotiated  that  point,  then  when 
the  movie  was  fin- 
ished and  the  head 
of  the  studio  was 
not  pleased  to  see 
a  big  red  box,  they 
wanted  of  course  to 
take  scissors  and  cut 
things  out.  If  I  had 
cut  it  out,  then  the 
audience  would  nev- 
er know  and  never 
seen  and  would've 
assumed  that  this 
is  what  the  director 
had  intended.  And. 
in  the  context  of  this 
scene  between  the 
professor  and  this 
student  on  a  num- 
ber of  levels  that  the 
censorship  box,  so  to 
speak,  added  even  an 
extra  layer  of  mean- 
ing that  I  found  re- 
ally a  kind  of  bonus.  You  could  say  it's  really  only  in  this  country,  the 
only  country  in  the  world  where  you  get  to  see  the  big  red  box.  It's  the 
only  studio  film  ever  made  with  a  big  red  box.  I  do  take  pride  in  that 
achievement,  and  I  would  certainly  do  it  again  if  it  were  required  of  me 
to  get  an  R-rating,  especially  knowing  that  the  rest  of  the  world  gets  to 
see  it  without  the  red  box.  If  you  do  rent  or  you  buy  the  DVD,  you  can 
press  a  button  and  see  the  family  version  or  press  another  button  and  see 
the  Todd  version. 

Hut  with  the  red  ho\.  as  our  human  mind  has  a  vivid  imagination,  do 
you  fvi'l  like  it  has  more  impact  in  the  scene? 

In  some  ways,  yes.  look  I  have  to  tell  you,  I'm  a  little  bit  squea- 
mish myself   When  we  were  shootnig  that  scene  I  had  to  look  away 


it  was  pretty  frightening.  I  hand  it  to  those  actors,  they  really  were 
troopers.  All  I  had  to  do  was  say,  "uh,  let's  do  it  one  more  time."  And, 
I  could  then  look  away. 

During  Palindromes  pre-production,  how  much  rehearsal  was  there 
with  the  actors? 

Same  as  on  every  other  movie,  meaning,  none.  Auditions  always 
function  as  rehearsal.  That's  when  I  evaluate  the  actor  before  me,  the 
limitations  and  what  the  actor  can  bring  as  well,  that's  where  I  figure 
it  all  out.  So  that,  when  I  see  the  actor,  one,  two,  three  months  later  on 
set,  it's  clear  in  my  head  and  the  actor's  head  what  the  aim  and  what 
it  is  I'm  looking  for. 

//  sounds  like  you  have  a  real  strong  way  of  letting  go.  knowing  that 
you  've  cast  the  right  person. 

Casting,  it's  true,  casting  is  everything.  If  you  cast  the  right  actors,  they 
make  you  look  good,  they  make  you  look  like  you  know  what  you're 
doing. 

Writing  Palindromes,  or  even  some  of  your  other  scripts,  how  long 
does  it  usually  take? 

Thirty  years.  I  don't  know.  It'sjust  everything  takes  a  lifetime.  You  use 
your  whole  life  experience,  understanding  and  reading  and  so  forth  to  put 
together  these  concoctions.  The  actual  writing  doesn't  take  so  long.  If 

you  wTote  three  pages 
a  day  for  a  whole 
year,  you'd  have  four 
feature  scripts  but  it 
just  doesn't  work  that 
way.  So,  I  have  no 
advice  to  any  writers 
on  how  to  do  this,  ex- 
cept you  just  have  to 
doit.  How  do  you  be- 
come a  better  writer? 
By  writing.  How  do 
you  become  a  better 
filmmaker?  By  actu- 
ally making  movies. 

(then  you  're  writing, 
do  you  hang  it  out.  or 
do  you  ruminate  over 
it.  put  it  in  the  draw- 
er for  a  while? 


Alexander  Bfickel  as  Peter  Paul  and  Sharon 


'loto  by  Macall  Polay 


With  each  one  it's 
somewhat  different, 
some  I  just  plow  through  from  beginning  to  end  and  others  it's  a  little 
bit  more  elliptical  to  process.  I  have  something  now  mostly  w  rittcn,  but 
I  haven't  had  a  chance  to  really  get  to  it  becau.se  these  last  two  months 
I've  just  been  touring  and  promoting  this  movie  [Palindromes].  When 
this  is  over  I  hope  to  be  able  to  finish  up  this  other  script. 

How  manv  shooting  days  were  on  Palindromes? 

We  got  about  40.  which  is  a  good  amount  But  1  don't  know  how  we 
couldve  done  it  otherwise  w  ith  all  these  children  and  so  forth  I  have 
good  producers.  I  don't  how  we  did  this,  under  a  million  [dollars]  and 
getting  that  many  days.  I  don't  know,  but  we  did  it.  You  need  to  work 
w ith  smart  good  people,  \ery  pleasant  people.  And  it's  ama/ing  how 
much  giiod  will  you  can  generate. 


Do  you  work  with  the  same  producers? 


Actually  both,  I  was  thinking  novelist-wise,  but  whatever  you  like. 


I've  worked  with  only  people  I've  liked,  but  they  have  changed  for 
different  reasons.  There's  some  I  may  work  with  again.  It  depends  on 
the  projects;  whoever's  appropriate  for  the  material  I  have  at  hand. 


There  are  so  many  great  writers  who  are  living  today,  from  Phillip 
Roth  to  Michel  Houellebecq  to...  I  enjoy  David  Sedaris.  There  are 
just  so  many  really. 


Regarding  your  first  feature.  Fear,  Anxiety,  and  Depression,  I've 
read,  I'm  not  sure  if  this  is  true,  that  it  was  kind  of  a  horrific  ex- 
perience for  you? 

Yeah,  it's  a  painful  experience.  It's  not  even  the  title  that  I  wanted,  so 
1  prefer  not  to  dwell  on  it. 

After  that,  what  helped  you  get  the  fire  again  to  go  into  Welcome  to 
the  DoUhouse.^ 

I  actually  wrote  the  script  for  Welcome  to  the  Dollhouse  before  I 
even  finished  that  movie,  to  really  just  to  redeem  myself  from  the 
horror  of  it  all.  But  then  I  just  needed  a  lot  of  time  and  space  to  be 
away  from  this  business.  Which  I  didn't  think  at  the  time  I'd  even 
return  to.  Ultimately,  I  suppose  I  didn't  want  that  movie  to  have  the 
last  word. 

What  are  your  inspirations,  outside  offilmmaking.  what  inspires  you? 


Outside  offilmmaking,  what  other  ways  do  you  express  your  creativ- 
ity-^ 

[laughing]  Well,  there's  so  many  ways.  I  always  think,  just  by  virtue 
of  being  a  filmmaker  doesn't  make  you  necessarily  such  a  creative 
person.  In  this  business  in  fact,  as  many  people  know,  the  most  cre- 
ative profession  is  the  accounting  one.  It's  really  what  you  bring  to  it, 
it's  what  you  bring  to  everything  that  you  do. 

If  you  weren  't  a  filmmaker,  what  do  you  think  your  profession  would 
be? 

I  don't  know.  There  are  all  sorts  of  things  that  interest  me.  Film  is  not 
the  center  of  the  universe.  I've  always  thought  of  working  in  India  or 
some  place  like  that.  I  applied  to  the  Peace  Corps  many  years  ago, 
but  I  was  rejected,  so  nothing  happened.  That  sort  of  thing  has  always 
appealed  to  me.  I  have  no  skills  and  that's  one  of  my  difficulties.  I 
don't  have  anything  to  offer  anyone. 


Everything  you  live  and  breathe,  it  is  all  material.  Even  as  we  speak  [laughing]  I  think  there 's  a  world  out  there  that  would  beg  to  differ. 
now,  it  is  all  material.  To  the  writer,  the  filmmaker,  the  artist,  what  have 

you,  is  to  access  the  moment  so  that  nothing  is  lost  upon  you,  that  you  Certainly,  if  I  go  to  another  country  and  I'm  trying  to  help  a  village, 

can  know  how  to  identify  and  transform  moments  into  something  that  what  can  1  do?  I  can  help  them  speak  English,  I  suppose,  but  I'm  not 

can  take  on  larger  meaning.  Really,  everything,  it's  all  material.  sure  that's  much  of  a  priority.  "^ 


Who  are  some  of  your  favorite  writers? 

You're  talking  movie  writers,  you're  talking  novelists? 


Tony  DuShane  edits  Cherry  Bleeds  (www.cherrybleeds.com)  and 
hosts  the  radio  show  Drinks  with  Tony  (www.drinkswithtony.com), 
where  you  can  hear  the  broadcast  of  this  interview.  He  lives  in  San 
Francisco. 


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howard  zinn 


inte         Peter  Werbe 
photos  Seven  Stories  Press 
origin 
Clamor  #1,Jan/Feb  2000 


When  Matt  Damon  and  Robin  Williams,  in  the  Academy  Award  winning  Good  Will  Hunting,  begin  trying  to 
one-up  each  other  by  naming  radical  writers  they  have  read.  Damon  trumps  Williams'  mention  of  MIT  social 
critic  Noam  Chomsky  by  suggesting  Boston  University  historian  Howard  Zinn's  book,  A  People's  History  of  the 
United  States,  1492-Present. 

This  notice  in  a  Hollywood  film  translated  into  additional  sales  of  100.000  copies  for  Zinn's  already  wildly  selling 
radical  history  text,  first  published  in  1980  by  Harper  Perennial.  With  a  twentieth  anniversary  edition  in  the  works, 
the  book  has  sold  over  650.000  copies  in  the  last  two  decades  and  has  become  a  bible  of  sorts  for  numerous  media 
stars  and  social  activists. 

Its  unprecedented  sales  recently  prompted  Fo.x  Television  to  put  up  $12  million  for  a  new  mini-series  based  on  the 
book.  The  series  is  scheduled  to  air  some  time  in  2000. 

The  book  has  spun  off  a  series  of  teaching  editions,  wall  charts,  and  abridged  versions.  The  79-year-old  Zinn  is 
also  author  of  several  personal  memoirs  including.  Declarations  of  Independence  (HarperCollins,  1991),  and  You 
Can't  Be  Neutral  on  a  Moving  Train  (Beacon  Press.  1995)  which  include  his  experiences  as  a  World  War  II  bombar- 
dier and  activist  in  the  civil  rights  and  anti-war  movements. 

His  latest  book  is  The  Future  of  History  (Common  Courage  Press,  1999),  which  records  a  series  of  interviews 
done  with  David  Barsamian  over  the  last  ten  years. 

He  spoke  to  Clamor  from  Cape  Cod. 


//;  the  hook  you've  done  with  David  Barsamian,  he  says  you're  fond 
of  quoting  George  Orwell's  dictum  from  1984  that,  "who  controls 
the  past  controls  the  future;  who  controls  the  present  controls  the 
past. "  Does  that  speak  to  the  title  of  the  hook? 

I  suppose  so  in  that  what  Orwell  was  saying  and  what  I  am  re- 
peating approvingly  is  that  history  is  controlled.  So  much  of  the 
information  in  our  culture  is  controlled  and  if  you  control  our  past, 
then  you  can  control  our  future.  In  that  sense  our  future  history, 
the  future  of  the  human  race,  depends  on  who  tells  the  story  about 
the  past. 


As  an  example,  if  American  history  is  told  as  a  series  of  great 
military  adventures,  that  will  tell  young  people  militarism  is  some- 
thing to  be  valued;  that  military  heroism  is  the  highest  representa- 
tion of  good  character.  And  that  will  insure  our  future  will  consist  of 
more  military  adventures.  So  by  presenting  that  kind  of  a  past,  you 
create  a  self-fulfilling  prophecy  about  the  future. 

On  the  other  hand,  if  you  do  what  I  think  we  ought  to  do  when 
we  tell  history,  without  ignoring  the  fact  that  we  fought  wars,  you 
emphasize  not  the  heroism  of  military  leaders  or  people  in  battle,  but 
those  people  who  have  always  struggled  against  war.  Those  people 
who  believed  in  peace.  The  people  who  opposed  the  Mexican  War 


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o 


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o 
o 


because  they  saw  it  as  a  fabricated  war  designed  to  simply  amass 
more  territory,  take  territory  away  from  Mexico.  Those  people  who 
opposed  World  War  I.  Those  people  who  opposed  the  Spanish-Amer- 
ican War.  The  people  who  opposed  the  Vietnam  War.  I  think  of  the 
anarchist  and  feminist,  Emma  Goldman,  as  one  of  those  people.  She 
went  to  prison  during  World  War  i  for  opposing  the  war. 

I  think  the  most  neglected  story  of  the  Vietnam  war  is  the  resis- 
tance to  it.  Not  just  on  the  part  of  civilians  here  at  home,  but  on  the 
part  of  GIs  and  the  movement  of  the  Vietnam  Veterans  Against  the 
War  organization.  There  has  been  so  much  talk  about  the  military 
side — should  we  have  done  this,  should  we  have  done  that,  could  we 
have  won,  did  we  win  the  Tet  offensive,  did  we  lose  the  Tet  offensive? 
If  the  story  of  the  resistance  is  told  to  generations  of  young  people,  I 
think  it  would  imbue  them  with  a  very  strong  feeling  that  it's  a  good 
idea  to  oppose  war. 

How  does  one  know  when  to  oppose  war?  You  pointedly  left  World 
War  II  out  of  that  series  of  wars  you  listed  in  which  you  were  a  com- 
batflyer. 

1  did  pointedly  leave  it  out  because  it  was  the  most  ambiguous  of 
situations.  In  the  question  of  just  and  unjust  wars,  some  wars  are  so 
obviously  unjust  and  so  obviously  done  for  profit  and  power  and  ex- 
pansion— the  Mexican  war,  the  Spanish  American  war.  World  War  I, 
the  Vietnam  War.  the  Korean  War,  the  Gulf  War.  Some  wars  are  ob- 
viously wrong.  Maybe  I  should  leave  out  the  Korean  war  since  there 
is  still  a  lot  of  uncertainty  among  the  American  population  about  the 
Korean  War. 

World  War  II  is  called  the  "good  war."  "Saving  Private  Ryan," 
Steven  Spielberg's  movie,  exalts  the  war  as  a  good  war,  even  while 
showing  the  horrors  of  D-Day.  Still,  the  horrors  had  a  context  of  be- 
ing in  the  end  necessary  because  it  was  a  good  war. 

Having  been  a  bombardier  in  the  Air  Force  in  World  War  II  and 
dropped  bombs,  even  though  I  had  been  an  enthusiastic  volunteer 
and  had  been  persuaded  that  it  was  a  just  war,  I  came  out  of  that 
experience  persuaded  that  war  simply  doesn't  solve  the  fundamental 
problems  we  face  as  a  human  race.  That  we  have  to  find  solutions 
other  than  war.  That  even  though  the  cause  may  be  just,  and  I  dis- 
tinguish between  a  just  cause  and  a  just  war,  even  though  the  cause 
may  be  just,  like  fighting  against  and  resisting  fascism,  but  doing  it 
via  war,  the  mass  slaughter  of  people,  40-50  million  people  killed 
in  World  War  11,  I  don't  think  is  the  best  way  to  solve  that  problem, 
the  best  way  to  support  that  just  cause.  I  think  the  human  race  has  to 
find  more  imaginative,  more  ingenious  ways  of  dealing  with  tyranny 
and  aggression  than  simply  indiscriminately  killing  large  numbers  of 
people  which  is  what  war  is  all  about. 

When  we  are  talking  about  history,  we  are  talking  about  national 
histories.  All  national  histories  are  triumphal  in  nature,  even  when 
they  are  the  history  of  great  losses,  for  instance,  like  the  Serbian 
myth  about  Kosovo.  As  a  historian  you  are  interested  in  portraying 
accurately  what  happened,  but  nation  states  have  a  different  intent. 

You  are  ab.solutely  right.  Nation  states  are  determined  to  exalt  what 
that  nation  has  done,  especially  in  war,  and  to  turn  every  situation 
into  a  triumph,  as  you  pointed  out  in  the  case  of  the  Serbs,  so  that 
even  m  defeat  it  is  looked  upon  as  a  heroic  moment  in  history.  But 
I  think  It  is  the  responsibility  of  citizens  in  a  democracy  to  think 
independently  of  the  nation  state.  There  is  a  mistaken  notion  about 
patriotism  which  is  encouraged  in  our  educational  system  and  in  our 
culture  because  the  nation  state  has  a  lot  t)f  power  o\er  the  cultural 
and  educational  systems.  It  says  that  to  be  patriotic,  which  is  a  good 
thing,  means  to  support  your  government  in  the  sense  of  "my  coun- 
try, right  or  wrong." 

You  hear  that  in  young  people  \s  ho  arc  going  off  to  enlist,   "I 


have  to  fight  for  my  country."  My  point  is  that  the  nation  state,  the 
government  here  and  anywhere  in  the  world,  is  not  the  country,  it  is 
not  the  people.  To  be  patriotic  in  the  best  sense  in  the  United  States  is 
not  to  support  whatever  the  government  does,  but  to  support  whatev-  ■ 
er  the  best  principles  of  our  society  are.  Very  often,  the  government 
acts  against  those  principles. 

1  see  the  principles  embodied  in  the  Declaration  of  Indepen- 
dence as  being  noble  and  good  principles.  That  is.  the  Declaration  of 
Independence  says  government  is  an  artificial  creation.  Government 
is  not  the  supreme  order  of  things  in  this  society.  According  to  the 
Declaration  of  Independence  the  government  is  an  artificial  entity  set 
up  by  the  people  to  achieve  certain  ends — life,  liberty,  the  pursuit  of 
happiness,  equality.  And  when  the  government,  as  the  Declaration 
says,  becomes  destructive  of  those  ends,  it  is  the  right  of  the  people 
to  alter  or  abolish  the  government. 

That's  a  very  revolutionary  statement  made  at  a  time  when  the 
United  States  was  breaking  away  from  the  nation  state  of  England. 
Then,  when  the  United  States  was  itself  a  nation  state,  it  forgot  about 
that  principle  of  the  Declaration  of  Independence  and  the  document 
was  consigned  to  being  displayed  on  classroom  walls  but  not  paid 
attention  to.  To  me,  being  patriotic  means  to  think  independently,  to 
support  the  principles  of  life  and  liberty  and  equality,  and,  as  1  see 
the  history  of  nation  states,  including  the  history  of  the  United  States, 
most  nation  states  act  against  the  principles  of  liberty  and  equality. 
They  act  on  behalf  of  a  relatively  small  group  of  wealthy  and  power- 
ful people  who  are  in  charge  of  the  nation  state.  We  know  that's  true 
of  countries  which  we  call  totalitarian  or  tyrannical;  there  it  is  obvi- 
ous. In  the  U.S.  it  is  not  so  obvious  because  we  have  three  branches  of 
government  and  we  have  elections  and  we  have  a  certain  amount  of 
freedom  of  the  press  and  free  speech.  Because  of  that  we  are  deluded 
into  thinking  the  government  represents  us.  but  1  don't  think  it  does. 

/  mentioned  earlier  that  as  an  historian,  you  are  interested  in  finding 
out  what  actually  happened,  but  I  posed  the  question  as  if  historians  . 
are  people  in  the  physical  sciences,  as  if  you  were  looking  at  bacteria 
under  a  microscope.  Like  all  the  social  sciences,  history  is  very  po- 
liticized. I  think  people  have  a  legitimate  skepticism  these  days.  They 
are  not  buying  the  official  myths  as  they  did  in  other  periods,  but 
how  does  one  know  who  to  believe?  How  can  you  do  a  reality  check 
between  what  Howard  Zinn  is  writing  and  another  interpretation^ 

J  recently  interviewed  the  conservative,  li'illiam  F.  Buckley  Jr. 
about  the  Cold  War.  How  does  someone  reading  an  interpretation  by 
Buckley  of  this  period  and  then  reading  Howard  Zinn's  A  People's 
History  of  the  United  States  and  getting  a  180  degree  opposite  view 
reconcile  two  contradictory  versions? 

It's  not  easy  to  answer  the  question,  how  do  you  really  get  the  truth 
when  it  is  so  complex  and  historical  reality  has  an  infinite  ainount 
of  information  in  it.  The  only  advice  1  would  give  to  somebod>  who 
is  trying  to  sort  things  out  is  to  say,  get  as  much  information  as  you  • 
can.  Get  as  many  diverse  viewpoints  as  you  can  and  see  \\ hat  makes 
more  sense  to  you. 

Listen  to  Buckley,  listen  to  me.  listen  to  (iar  .Mperovitz  who 
writes  the  history  of  the  atomic  bomb  or  listen  to  Marilyn  Young 
who  writes  the  history  of  the  Vietnam  war  and  listen  to  the  official 
histories  of  the  Vietnam  war  and  the  official  line  and  decide  on  what 
makes  sense.  Ultimately,  it  is  an  indn  idual  decision,  but  the  impor- 
tant thing  IS  to  have  the  diverse  v  icwpoints  to  choose  from.  The  prob- 
lem with  history  and  with  inlormation  in  the  press  is  that  too  often 
we  do  not  get  a  full  spectrum  of  views  to  choose  from. 

Take  the  recent  situation  in  Kosovo  where  we  did  get  a  full  pic- 
ture of  the  horrors  inflicted  bv  the  Serbs  on  the  people  of  Kosovo,  the 
Albanians,  who  were  searching  for  independence  It  was  a  horrible 
story,  but  there  is  another  set  of  facts  that  has  to  be  paid  attention  to 
and  I  don't  think  the  media  really  played  this  up.  Most  of  the  refu- 


gees  streaming  out  of  Kosovo,  most  of  the  terrible  things  done  by  the 
Serbs,  happened  after  we  started  bombing.  In  other  words,  our  bomb- 
ing intensified  and  worsened  what  was  happening,  five-fold,  ten-fold. 
This  is  a  very  important  fact  and  there  are  also  other  very  important 
facts  to  consider  which  were  completely  ignored  by  the  press  and  by 
television. 

If  you  just  listened  to  the  Administration's  side  you  would  say, 
well,  this  is  a  humanitarian  effort.  We  care  about  what  is  happening. 
The  people  in  Kosovo  are  being  mistreated.  But  there  is  other  infor- 
mation you  need.  You  need  to  know  that  at  the  same  time  the  people 
in  Kosovo  are  being  subjected  to  terrible  things  by  the  Serbs,  the  peo- 
ple of  Iraq  are  suffering  and  dying  by  the  hundreds  of  thousands  as  a 
result  of  the  sanction  policies  of  the  U.S..  You  have  to  know  that  the 
ethnic  cleansing  that  has  been  going  on  for  years  in  Turkey — people 
uprooted  from  their  homes,  from  their  villages,  thousands  of  people 
killed,  and  that  Turkey  is  a  U.S.  ally  and  has  done  these  things  to  the 
Kurds  in  Turkey  with  American  military  equipment. 

Now,  if  you  added  that  to  the  picture,  not  forgetting  what  the 
Serbs  did  in  Kosovo,  it  wouldn't  be  a  simple  affirmation  of  "Oh,  we 
are  doing  good  things  there  because  our  go\ernment  is  concerned 
with  what  happens  to  people."  Then  you  would  be  skeptical  of 
whether,  in  fact,  our  government  cares  about  what  happens  to  human 
beings  and  you  would  wonder  what  other  motives  there  are  for  the 
bombing  of  Yugoslavia. 

Let's  return  to  alternate  versions  of  history,  for  instance,  the  Cold 
War.  The  official  version  is  that  after  World  War  II  and  the  defeat 
of  the  Nazis,  the  U.S.  found  itself  in  a  confrontation  with  another 
hostile  power~lhe  Soviet  Union-which.  like  the  Nazis,  was  equally 
bent  on  world  domination.  We  had  to  defend  Europe  from  imminent 
Soviet  aggression,  and  at  home  there  was  an  internal  subversion 
threat  from  people  who  were  loyal  not  to  the  U.S.  government  but  to 
the  Soviet  Union  and  its  plans  for  world  domination.  Although  there 
may  have  been  some  excesses  in  the  zeal  in  which  internal  commu- 
nism was  combatted  (such  as  McCarthyism).  ultimately  it  was  an 
important  cause. 

Hmm,  the  business  of  the  Cold  War  and  its  origins.  There  have  been 
dozens  of  volumes  about  that,  and  who  started  the  Cold  War.  Did  it 
start  because  the  U.S.,  this  kindly  nation,  saw  the  Soviet  Union,  this 
evil  empire,  bent  on  world  domination,  so  we  built  up  our  forces? 
That  doesn't  make  sense.  It  doesn't  conform  to  the  historical  record. 

There  is  no  evidence  that  the  Soviet  Union  was  bent  on  world 
domination.  American  intelligence  experts  have  said  since  then,  the 
Soviet  Union  had  no  intention  of  invading  Western  Europe.  The  So- 
viet Union  did  want  to  control  Eastern  Europe.  The  Soviet  Union 
was  expansionist  with  regard  to  Eastern  Europe.  I  am  not  trying  to 
paint  the  Soviet  Union  as  a  nice  power.  All  that  I  am  saying  is  that  the 
Soviet  Union  had  designs  on  Eastern  Europe  to  influence  and  control 
Eastern  Europe  just  as  the  U.S.  had  designs  on  control  and  influence 
of  Latin  America. 

In  other  words,  they  saw  Eastern  Europe  as  their  sphere  of  in- 
fluence. The  U.S.  has  always  seen  Latin  America  as  its  sphere  of 
influence.  Both  powers  have  been  expansionist,  both  powers  have 
been  ambitious,  both  powers  have  wanted  to  have  more  and  more  in- 
fluence in  the.world.  Both  are  imperial  powers.  The  U.S.  was  always 
ahead  in  the  arms  race.  The  U.S.  was  the  first  to  build  and  use  the 
atomic  bomb.  The  U.S.  had  a  huge  arsenal  of  nuclear  bombs  and  the 
Soviet  Union  was  constantly  trying  to  catch  up.  So,  it's  not  a  matter 
of  one  being  a  hero  and  one  being  a  villain,  one  being  good  and  one 
being  bad.  1  see  it  as  two  empires  vying  for  power  in  the  world. 

Internally,  the  U.S.  government  used  the  hysteria  of  the  Soviets 
as  a  basis  for  destroying  whatever  atmosphere  of  freedom  existed, 
through  the  U.S.  House  un-American  Activities  Committee,  the  FBI 
keeping  files  on  millions  of  people.  And.  it  was  not  just  McCarthy, 


but  democrats  and  republicans  alike;  Truman  also.  The  loyalty  oaths 
he  instituted  in  1947,  and  Hubert  Humphrey  with  his  sponsorship  of 
the  Communist  Control  Act. 

Was  there  ever  an  authentic  internal  threat  from  communism? 

That  was  a  figment  of  J.  Edgar  Hoover's  imagination. 

Why  the  hysteria?  Was  there  any  economic  or  political  gain  for  any- 
body to  create  this  hysteria  in  the  late  '40s  and  early  '50s? 

I  think  there  were  political  gains  for  both  parties.  It's  always  a  politi- 
cal plus  for  a  party  when  it  can  create  an  internal  enemy.  First,  you 
artificially  create  an  enemy.  After  all,  the  Communist  Party  in  the 
U.S.  was  not  in  a  position  to  overthrow  the  government  or  do  any- 
thing important.  The  Communist  Party  was  really  quite  weak  and 
what  the  government  was  really  after  was  not  communists,  but  any- 
body who  had  anti-government  views,  or  was  critical  of  American 
foreign  policy. 

The  FBI  kept  files  on  white  people  who  met  with  black  people. 
There  was  stuff  in  their  files  on  so-and-so  who  attended  a  Paul  Robe- 
son concert.  The  major  victims  of  McCarthyism  and  the  Cold  War 
at  home  were  not  Communists.  The  major  victims  were  ordinary 
Americans  who  were  dissenters  from  the  establishment.  People  in 
Hollywood,  who  were  not  about  to  overthrow  the  government.  Writ- 
ers and  directors  who  were  liberals,  progressives,  maybe  some  of 
them  were  members  of  the  Communist  Party;  I  don't  know.  But  it 
was  an  effective  way  for  both  major  parties  to  gain  political  credits 
with  the  American  people. 

Also,  and  this  is  very  important,  it  became  the  Soviet  Union 
abroad  and  the  so-called  communist  menace  at  home  that  was  the  ex- 
cuse for  building  up  a  huge  military  machine.  We  spent  trillions  and 
trillions  of  dollars  since  World  War  II,  on  the  basis  of  an  over-blown, 
over-inflated  threat  of  world  domination,  money  which  could  have 
been  used  to  make  this  an  ideal  society,  to  wipe  out  poverty,  wipe 
out  homelessness,  create  universal  free  health  care  for  everyone.  The 
amount  of  money  which  has  been  wasted,  and  continues  to  be  wasted 
in  building  up  a  huge  military  apparatus,  is  based  on  threats  that  are 
more  imagined  than  real. 

You  see  it  today.  Now  that  the  Soviet  Union  is  gone,  they  don't 
have  that  reason  for  a  military  machine,  so  you  invent  other  reasons. 
You  take  little  pip-squeak  nations  around  the  world  and  say  North 
Korea  is  a  threat,  Iraq  is  a  threat,  Serbia  is  a  threat.  On  that  basis,  you 
waste  $200-300  billion  dollars  worth  of  the  taxpayers'  money  annu- 
ally on  military  apparatus. 

/  know  in  your  hook  People 's  History  of  the  United  States,  you  show 
evidence  that  after  World  War  II  there  was  a  fear  in  the  ruling  circles 
that  the  economy  could  collapse  since  the  U.S.  was  suddenly  left 
without  an  enemy  to  justify  large  war  expenditures.  Does  the  U.S. 
operate  on  a  permanent  military  economy? 

No  doubt  about  it.  The  military  budget  has  absorbed  a  huge,  huge 
amount  of  the  wealth  of  the  nation.  On  the  one  hand,  you  might  say 
it  has  staved  off  an  economic  crisis.  On  the  other,  it  has  wasted  our 
wealth.  We  could  stave  off  an  economic  crisis  by  having  huge  public 
works  programs  in  which  we  used  the  money  spent  for  nuclear  subma- 
rines and  jet  aircraft,  and  use  that  money  to  build  our  cities,  clear  up 
our  lakes  and  rivers  and  take  care  of  our  people.  tV 

Peter  Werbe  is  a  long-time  staff  member  of  the  Fifth  Estate,  the  longest 
running,  English  language,  anti-authoritarian  publication  in  North 
American  his  tor}'.  He  has  also  hosted  Detroit 's  Nightcall  talk  show  for 
35  years  on  WRIF-FM.  Peter's  web  site  is  petei-n'erbe.com. 


O 

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eljzabeth  martinez 


Chris  Crass 


6  4T7lizabeth  "Betita"  Martinez  is  a  national  and  international  treasure.  Her  life  and  work  provide  a  model  of 
X-/ internationalism  and  solidarity,  as  well  as  local  organizing.  "Think  globally,  act  locally"  was  her  practice  long 
before  the  slogan  was  created.  "From  work  for  decolonization  at  the  United  Nations,  to  the  Civil  Rights  Movement, 
to  pioneering  the  women's  liberation  movement,  to  local  organizing  in  New  Mexico  and  California,  to  top-rate 
journalism  and  political  theory,  Betita  continues  to  blaze  trails  and  create  priceless  legacies,  mentoring  countless 
social  activists,  young  and  old,  male  and  female,  people  of  all  colors,  gay  and  straight,  always  with  astonishing 
patience  and  intelligence."  This  is  how  Roxanne  Dunbar-Ortiz  describes  her  friend  of  30  years.  Dunbar-Ortiz  has 
been  involved  in  radical  politics  and  activism  since  the  sixties.  She  founded  one  of  the  first  groups  of  the  Women's 
Liberation  Movement,  Cell  1 6  and  helped  edit  their  journal,  "No  More  Fun  and  Games."  She  is  the  author  of  Red  Dirt: 
Growing  Up  Okie  and  she's  a  regular  reader  at  the  Anarchist  Cafe  nights  in  San  Francisco. 


Betita  Martinez  lives  in  the  Mission  District  of  San  Francisco, 
where  she  is  involved  in  many  difTcrcnt  projects  and  campaigns.  Her 
main  project  is  the  Institute  for  MultiRacial  Justice,  which  she  co- 
founded  in  1997.  She  serves  as  the  co-chair  of  the  Institute  and  edits 
the  Institute's  publication.  Shades  of  Power. 

The  Institute  aims  to  "serve  as  a  resource  center  that  will 
strengthen  the  struggle  against  White  Supremacy  by  combating  the 
tactics  of  divide-and-control  and  advancing  solidarity  among  people 
of  color"  (from  the  group's  Mission  Statement). 

The  Institute  serves  as  a  clearinghouse  of  information  about 
joint  work  done  by  communities  of  color  locally,  regionally  and 
eventually  on  a  national  basis.  The  Institute  provides  educational 
materials  to  help  build  greater  understanding  and  respect  between 
people  of  color.  Working  to  build  solidarity  between  communities 
of  color,  the  Institute  holds  educational  forums  on  topics  and  issues 
that  are  not  only  important  to  communities  of  color,  but  that  have 
divided  people  of  color.  Forum  topics  have  included  immigrant 
rights  and  bilingual  education  and  the  these  events  bring  together 
organizers  from  various  groups  to  have  a  dialogue  about  the  issues. 
These  forums  and  other  work  done  by  the  Institute  try  to  provide  a 
site  for  people  from  different  communities  of  color  to  meet  with  each 
other  and  find  ways  to  support  one  another. 


In  October  of  1999,  Martinez  and  the  Institute  put  together  the 
Shades  of  Power  Festival:  Alliance  Building  With  Film  and  Video. 
The  festival's  program  stated,  "the  movies  show  how  different  peoples 
of  color  in  the  U.S.  have  related  and  worked  together  in  common 
struggles  for  social  justice.  A  few  of  the  videos  focus  on  a  single  group 
whose  struggle  continues  today  and  needs  support  from  other  people 
of  color."  The  festival  featured  movies  about  Ethnic  Studies  student 
strikes  in  '68-'69,  the  Puerto  Rican  Young  Lords  Party,  Angela  Davis, 
June  Jordan,  Yuri  Kochiyama.  the  Japanese  Internment  Camps  during 
WWII,  housing  struggles  by  Latinos,  Filipinos,  African-Americans, 
repression  and  resistance  at  the  U.S.  Mexico  border,  labor  organizing 
and  environmental  justice  campaigns.  In  all,  about  20  films  were 
viewed.  Between  movies,  there  were  four  discussion  panels  with 
organizers  from  various  groups  on  gentrification  in  San  Francisco, 
immigrant  rights  and  environmental  justice.  Hundreds  of  people  went 
to  the  festival. 

The  other  main  project  of  the  Institute  is  publishing  Shades  of 
Power.  It  is  published  as  a  step  in  the  direction  of  creating  an  anti-racist, 
anti-capitalist  ideological  climate.  Shades  of  Power,  which  is  currently 
on  its  6th  issue,  is  full  of  articles  on  organizing  around  environmental 
justice  issues,  police  brutality,  violence  in  public  schools,  workers" 
rights,  immigration  and  incarceration  —  to  name  a  few.  All  of  the 


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articles  focus  on  pro-active  campaigns  and  positive  activism  with 
special  attention  paid  to  alliance  building  among  people  of  color. 

Shack's  of  Power  helps  the  Institute  work  towards  their  long- 
term  goals.  According  to  their  mission  statement,  the  Institute  is 
"committed  to  linking  the  struggle  of  Third  World  unity  with  struggles 
to  build  a  new  society  free  of  class  relations,  sexism,  homophobia, 
environmental  abuse,  and  the  other  diseases  of  our  times." 

Working  with  women's  groups  is  a  special  focus  of  the  Institute, 
"because  women  have  often  taken  the  lead  in  building  alliances 
among  people  of  color."  Organizing  with  youth  is  also  a  major 
focus  of  the  Institute  with  the  goal  of  developing  autonomous  youth 
initiatives.  The  Institute  was  active  in  the  youth  led  campaign  against 
Proposition  21  in  California.  Prop  21,  the  juvenile  crime  initiative, 
makes  it  easier  to  prosecute  children  as  adults,  broadly  defines  gangs 
and  gang  membership  to  include  most  aspects  of  hip-hop  culture  and 
crimmalizes  it  and  plays  on  social  fears  of  crime  committed  by  young 
people  of  color  —  regardless  of  the  fact  that  violent  youth  crime  has 
declined  significantly  in  the  last  few  years.  When  youth  organizations 
like  Third  Eye  Movement,  Homey  Network,  and  the  Critical 
Resistance  Youth  Task  Force  mobilized  and  organized  thousands  of 
young  people,  the  Institute  offered  support  and  solidarity.  As  Roxanne 
stated  earlier,  Betita  is  a  mentor  to  countless  activists  and  organizers. 
Her  years  of  experience,  her  firm  dedication  to  radical  social  change 
and  her  wisdom  and  insights  into  organizing  have  influenced  and 
inspired  many  who  are  active  today,  especially  young  women  of  color 
organizers. 

In  addition  to  the  Institute,  Martinez  is  also  involved  with  many 
different  organizations  in  the  Bay  Area,  such  as  the  Women  of  Color 
Resource  Center  and  Media  Alliance.  Betita  is  also  the  author  of  the 
book  De  Colores  Means  All  Of  Us:  Latimi  Views  of  a  Multi-ColorecJ 
Century,  published  by  South  End  Press  in  1998. 

Betita's  book,  De  Colores  Means  "All  Of  Us,  which  hit  the 
shelves  last  year,  is  a  chronicle  of  organizing  and  alliance  building 
throughout  her  years  of  work.  The  book  is  a  collection  of  essays 
that  range  from  discussions  on  attacks  against  immigrant  rights 
and  affirmative  action  to  contemporary  struggles  for  Ethnic  Studies 
lead  by  Latina/o  youth.  Betita's  book  is  full  of  essays  that  develop  a 
radical  Chicana  perspective  and  analysis  on  society,  race  relations, 
history,  dynamics  between  men  and  women  in  past  and  present 
activism  and  on  the  future  of  building  a  multiracial,  anti-racist, 
queer  liberationist,  feminist,  anti-capitalist  movement.  The  essays 
are  packed  with  stories,  examples  of  past  activism,  models  of  past 
and  present  organizing  and  inspiration  to  implement  lessons  in  the 
book  into  our  organizing  efforts. 

Elizabeth  Martinez  traces  her  political  consciousness  back  to  her 
childhood.  Her  father  had  moved  from  Mexico  into  the  US  and  after 
quite  a  few  years  of  financial  hardship  ended  up  working  in  Washington 
DC  as  a  secretary  in  the  Mexican  Embassy.  She  remembers  growing  up 
with  stories  of  the  Mexican  Revolution,  Zapata  and  US  imperialism. 
Also,  Martinez  grew  up  in  a  middle-class  white  suburb  of  DC  and  was 
the  only  person  of  color  in  school,  which  made  her  painfully  aware 
of  racism  and  while  supremacy.  After  WWII.  Martinez  went  to  work 
at  the  United  Nations  as  a  researcher  on  colonialism  decolonization 
efforts  and  strategics.  During  the  McCarthy  Era.  her  section  chief 
and  other  co-workers  at  the  UN  were  fired  for  having  past  or  present 
connections  with  Communism.  In  1959,  three  months  after  the  Cuban 
Revolution  claimed  victory,  Martinez  went  to  Cuba  to  witness  a 
successful  anti-colonial,  socialist  struggle.  This  trip  to  Cuba  had  a 
profound  impact  on  her. 

In  addition  to  Cuba.  Martinez  later  traveled  to  the  Soviet  Union. 
Poland,  Hungary.  Vietnam  (during  the  war)  and  China  to  witness  how 
people  were  implementing  socialism. 

When  the  sit-in  movement  swept  acro.ss  the  South  in  1960.  a  new 
and  exciting  form  of  direct  action  organizing  was  taking  shape  uhich 
so«)n  lead  lo  the  fonnation  of  the  Student  Non-Violent  Coordinating 


Committee.  SNCC  was  one  of  the  most  important  organizations 
of  the  1960s  as  it  successfully  experimented  with  various  forms  of 
community  organizing,  direct  action  tactics,  radically  democratic 
decision-making  and  an  egalitarian  vision  that  inspired  and  influenced 
countless  other  groups  and  projects  in  that  *60s  and  into  today.  While 
SNCC,  along  with  the  Southern  Civil  Rights  Movement,  is  generally 
remembered  as  a  Black  led  struggle  with  the  involvement  of  whites  — 
Betita  was  one  of  two  Chicanas  working  full-time  for  SNCC;  Maria 
Varela  was  also  a  SNCC  organizer.  Martinez  originally  ser\ed  as  the 
director  of  SNCC's  office  in  New  York.  Betita  edited  the  photo  history 
book.  The  Movement,  which  not  only  raised  funds  for  SNCC,  but  also 
brought  graphic  images  of  the  Civil  Rights  movement  into  homes 
across  the  United  States.  Martinez  was  an  organizer  with  SNCC  in 
1964  during  the  Mississippi  Summer  project  (often  referred  to  as 
Freedom  Summer). 

In  1968,  a  year  of  revolution  and  repression  around  the  worid. 
she  moved  to  New  Mexico  to  work  in  the  land  grant  movement  of 
Chicanos/as  struggling  to  recover  lands  lost  when  the  US  took  over 
half  of  Mexico  with  the  1 846-48  war.  There  she  launched  an  important 
movement  newspaper.  El  Grito  del  Norte  (The  Cry  of  the  North),  and 
continued  publishing  it  for  5  years  along  with  other  activism.  El  Grito 
reported  on  international  activism  and  sought  to  show  connections 
between  different  struggles.  At  the  Chicano  Communications  Center, 
which  she  co-founded  in  Albuquerque,  she  edited  the  bilingual 
pictorial  volume  500  Years  of  Chicano  History  at  a  time  when  almost 
no  books  existed  on  the  subject.  The  pictorial  became  the  basis  of 
her  educational  video  Viva  La  Causa!  which  has  been  shown  at  film 
festivals  and  classrooms  across  the  country.  In  all  of  this  activism,  she 
worked  with  and  trained  many  young  Chicanas/os. 

In  the  late  ■60s  when  the  Women's  Liberation  Mo\ement 
exploded  across  the  country  with  feminist  groups,  publications,  protest 
actions,  manifestos  and  speakers  everywhere,  Elizabeth  Martinez  was 
in  New  Mexico  helping  shape  the  newly  developing  movement.  In  her 
essay.  "History  Makes  Us.  We  Make  History"  from  the  anthology.  The 
Feminist  Memoir  Project:  Voices  From  Women's  Liberation.  Betita 
talks  about  developing  a  Chicana  feminism  that  confronts  race,  class 
and  gender  inequality.  In  that  essay  she  writes  about  the  whiteness 
of  the  Women's  Liberation  Movement  and  the  sexism  in  the  Chicano 
Movement  and  the  need  to  struggle  against  all  forms  of  oppression. 
During  this  time.  Betita  was  made  an  honorary  member  of  WITCH 
(Women's  International  Conspiracy  from  Hell). 

Since  1976  she  has  been  living  in  the  Bay  Area.  Betita  became 
deeply  involved  in  leftist  party  building  politics  for  10  years.  In 
1982  she  ran  for  Governor  of  California  on  the  Peace  and  Freedom 
Party  ticket;  the  first  Chicana  on  the  ballot  for  that  office.  She  has 
also  taught  courses  in  Ethnic  Studies  and  Women  Studies  at  Hayward 
State  University.  Martinez  has  traveled  all  across  the  United  States 
speaking  on  colleges  and  in  classrooms  about  race,  class,  gender 
issues  and  organizing.  She  has  teamed  up  with  longtime  activist  Elena 
Featherston.  also  a  co-founder  of  the  Institute,  and  they  have  done  joint 
speaking  tours  called  "Black  and  Brown  Get  Down",  which  aim  at 
building  alliances  between  people  of  color  She  has  consistently  been 
a  mentor  over  the  years  to  new  and  long-time  activists  and  organizers 
helping  transfer  skills,  knowledge  and  experience  in  elTort  to  build 
our  movements.  In  addition  to  editing  Slunies  of  Power,  she  is  also  a 
regular  contributor  to  /  .\la}:a:inc  and  other  publications. 

The  Institute  for  MultiRacial  Justice  is  just  the  latest  project  in 
a  long  list  of  efforts  to  make  the  world  a  better  place.  Like  her  other 
projects,  the  Institute  works  lo  de\elop  long-range  goals  and  \  ision  to 
guide  acli\isls  from  one  slnigglc  to  the  next.  .As  we  nunc  from  one 
crisis  lo  the  next  from  welfare  refomi.  lo  the  ending  of  affirmative 
action,  lo  the  bombing  of  Koso\ o.  to  Mumia's  execution  we  become 
wom-down  and  bumed-out.  Betita  reminds  us  that  we  must  remember 
that  we  are  part  of  a  movement,  wc  are  part  of  something  much  bigger 
than  ourseKes  and  we  are  not  alone  in  the  struggle.  She  reminds  us 


that  while  we  confront  budget  cuts  in  Ethnic  Studies  programs  or  new 
attacks  against  the  civil  rights  of  homeless  people,  that  we  must  hold 
onto  our  goals  —  solidarity,  community,  revolution,  egalitarianism,  a 
new  world.  She  reminds  us  that  as  activists,  as  organizers,  we  have  a 
responsibility  to  teach  and  train  others  —  that  we  have  a  responsibility 
to  actively  build  a  new  world. 

Martinez  also  has  much  to  say  to  us  about  how  we  build 
movements  for  social  change.  After  the  massive  resistance  to  the 
Worid  Trade  Organization  in  Seattle,  Martinez  wrote  the  widely 
distributed  and  highly  influential  essay,  "Where  Was  the  Color  in 
Seattle?  Looking  for  reasons  why  the  Great  Battle  was  so  white."  She 
writes,  "Understanding  the  reasons  for  the  low  level  of  color,  and  what 
can  be  learned  from  it,  is  crucial  if  we  are  to  make  Seattle's  promise 
of  a  new,  international  movement  against  imperialist  globalization 
come  true."  Through  interviews  and  obser\'ations  she  writes  about 
the  lessons  that  organizers  —  people  of  color  and  white  —  must 
learn.  We  must  connect  the  issues  of  imperialist  globalization  to  local 
community  issues.  White  radicals  need  to  develop  and  put  forward  an 
analysis  of  corporate  domination  that  understands  racial  oppression 
in  the  third  world  and  in  the  United  States.  She  writes  that  radicals  of 
color  need  to  be  networking  and  connecting  their  work  with  a  global 
framework.  White  radicals  need  to  go  beyond  their  familiar  circles 
and  form  coalitions  with  people  of  color  with  an  understanding  of 
how  white  activists  in  the  past  have  betrayed  people  of  color  White 
radicals  need  a  strong  race,  class  and  gender  analysis  and  it  should 
be  central  to  their  political  world  view.  It  must  be  remembered  that 
white  radicals  have  a  responsibility  to  develop  anti-racist  politics  and 
actively  confront  white  privilege.  As  radicals  of  color  organize  in 


communities  of  color,  white  radicals  interested  in  movement  building 
must  strengthen  the  anti-racist  politics  of  predominately  white  groups 
and  activist  communities. 

Martinez  also  has  much  to  say  in  her  writings  about  the  day- 
today  organizing  work  that  we  engage  in.  She  stresses  that  we  must 
take  education  and  training  folks  seriously.  If  we  are  to  become 
a  participatory,  radically  democratic,  feminist,  multi-racial,  anti- 
capitalist,  queer  liberationist,  internationalist  movement  —  then  we 
need  to  work  at  it.  We  need  to  teach  each  other  skills,  tactics,  and 
political  analysis  so  that  we  can  all  be  leaders  in  a  movement  for  our 
collective  liberation. 

Martinez  and  other  radicals  of  her  generation  have  much  to  teach 
the  younger  generation  of  today.  It  is  critical  that  we  listen,  learn  and 
develop  relationships  based  on  common  respect.  tV 

For  more  information  about  the  Institute  for  MultiRacial  Justice  or  to 
receive  Shades  of  Power  write:  522  Valencia  St.,  San  Francisco,  CA 
941 10.  For  an  inspiring  read  pick-up  De  Colores  Means  All  Of  Us. 

Chris  Crass  is  the  coordinator  of  the  Catalyst  Project,  a  center  for 
political  education  and  movement  building.  They  prioritize  anti- 
racist  work  with  mostly  white  sections  of  the  global  justice  and  anti- 
war movements  with  the  goal  of  deepening  anti-racist  commitment 
in  white  communities  and  building  multiracial  left  movements 
for  liberation.  His  essays  on  collective  liberation  politics,  anti- 
authoritarian  leadership,  organizing  strategy  and  movement  building 
have  been  published  widely  in  Left  Turn,  Clamor  and  on  ZNet  and 
Infoshop.org. 


NEW  FROM 


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christian  parenti 


interview  Freja  Joslin 

" ' "'nally  [jrinieL;  iii 
Jul/Aug  2001 


Christian  Parenti,  radical  political  economist  and  professor  at  San  Francisco's  New  College,  offered  the  prison 
abolitionist  movement  a  much-needed  resource  last  year  with  his  powerful  book,  Lockdown  America.  Acces- 
sible and  comprehensive,  Parenti  has  accomplished  a  work  exhaustive  in  its  research  and  descriptive  in  its  accounts 
of  police  and  prison  terror.  Detailing  the  historical  roots  of  our  current  criminal  justice  crisis,  Lockdown  America 
reflects  a  thoroughly  researched  radical  critique  of  the  criminal  justice  system  build-up.  Activists  in  Prescott,  Arizona, 
brought  Parenti  to  the  Grand  Canyon  State  for  a  speaking  tour  in  early  November  2000.  In  Prescott  his  talk  began  with 
a  horrifying  statistic  —  the  United  States  has  four  percent  of  the  world's  population,  yet  25  percent  of  the  world's 
prisoners.  In  a  talk  that  spanned  the  course  of  contemporary  U.S.  history,  Parenti  began  with  the  political  crisis  of  the 
1960s,  followed  by  the  economic  recession  of  the  1970s  and  the  War  on  Drugs  in  the  '80s  and  '90s.  Unlike  the  prison 
industrial  complex  model,  which  examines  specific  and  direct  profit  motives  behind  the  build-up,  Parenti  argued  for 
a  model  that  examines  the  class  system  as  well  as  white  supremacy. 


The  story  goes  like  this:  During  the  social  unrest  in  the  '60s,  law 
enforcement  struggles  with  its  project  of  repression  (cases  in  point  — 
the  Watts  riot  and  the  Democratic  National  Convention  of  1 968  in  Chi- 
cago). So  Johnson  creates  the  Omnibus  Act  of  1968  which  establishes 
the  Law  Enforcement  Assistance  Administration  (LEAA)  to  provide  SI 
billion  per  year  for  technical  support  and  training  (SWAT)  to  local  law 
enforcement  agencies.  In  the  '7()s  and  early  "SOs.  labor  is  attacked  by 
the  ruling  class  as  the  economy  is  restructured  (Reagonomics)  and  a 
forced  recession  increases  poverty  and  concentrates  it  mostly  in  cities. 
In  the  early  '80s  we  see  imprisonment  and  prison  construction  surge 
astronomically.  Parenti  proposes  that  the  current  crisis  (nearly  two  mil- 
lion impnsoned  in  the  United  States)  is  rooted  in  "the  transformation 
of  the  class  and  occupational  structure  of  American  society."  Instead  of 
the  "counterinsurgency  by  other  means"  crackdown  on  the  rebellious 
"60s.  '8()s-style  anti-crime  repression  was  borne  from  a  difTcrent  sort  of 
threat.  Reagonomics  had  increased  poverty  and  created  the  social  break- 
down which  accompanies  the  disempowemient  of  working  class  com- 
munities. The  destabilizing  effect  of  inequality  needed  to  be  countered 


by  a  containment  policy  for  those  "cast-off  classes."  Add  this  to  the 
right-wing's  love  affair  with  scapegoating  —  whether  it's  immigrants, 
the  poor,  people  of  color  or  youth  —  and  you've  got  the  recipe  for  a  na- 
tion where  one  in  three  African-American  men  in  their  20s  are  currently 
entangled  in  the  criminal  justice  system. 

The  War  on  Drugs,  as  a  racialized  war  on  the  poor,  also  gets  go- 
ing in  the  "SOs  with  a  slew  of  crime  bills  increasing  funding  and  power 
of  police  and  the  FBI.  In  response  to  the  LA  riots  in  1992  and  grow- 
ing fear  of  violent  criminals,  prison  spending  skyrockets  as  Clinton's 
1994  Prison  Reform  Act  forces  longer  sentences  and  more  prisoners. 
By  the  early  '90s.  politicians  are  using  "tough  on  crime"  rhetoric  to 
win  elections  as  "crime-baiting"  appeals  to  the  middle  class's  anxiety 
about  instability  of  jobs,  quality  of  education  and  life.  This  policy  by- 
product has  a  momentum  of  its  own,  one  with  deadly  consequences. 

Parenti  focused  his  talk  on  the  prison  industrial  complex,  argu- 
ing that  the  traditional  analysis  of  this  complex-which  relies  on  the 
interplay  of  economic  stimulus  by  prison  construction,  privatization 
and  exploitation  of  prison  labor  —  offers  little  explanation  for  the  kind 


o 
o 


o 
o 


of  build-up  we  are  witnessing.  He  stresses  that  we  currently  have  a 
"lockdovvn  economy,  one  based  not  on  direct  and  specific  corporate 
interests,  but  rather  on  an  analysis  of  punishment  and  terror  as  class 
struggle  from  above."  Throughout  Lockdown  America.  Parcnti  returns 
to  a  discussion  of  contradictions,  the  most  fundamental  bemg  the  fact 
that  capitalism  needs  and  creates  poverty  and  surplus  populations,  yet 
faces  the  threat  of  "political,  aesthetic,  and  cultural  disruption"  from 
these  same  poor  and  surplus  populations.  F^e  ends  this  discussion  w  ith 
a  brief  but  all-encompassing  thesis;  "Prison  and  criminal  justice.are 
about  managing  these  irreconcilable  contradictions." 

I  sat  down  to  talk  with  Christian  Parenti  during  his  November 
2000  speaking  tour  through  Arizona.  The  following  is  a  portion  of 
that  interview. 

How  did  you  first  get  involved  and  become  interested  in  police  and 
prison  issues? 

1  think  it  flowed  from  a  more  generalized  interest  in  violence.  I've 
always  been  aware  of  the  ubiquity  of  violence  in  our  society,  so  as  a 
young  person  in  the  early  '90s  living  in  San  Francisco,  in  what  at  that 
time  was  considered  a  rough  neighborhood,  there  was  a  lot  of  police 
activity  and  violence,  gang  violence.  The  state  was  involved  in  a  big 
project  of  policing,  not  necessarily  political  because  there  wasn't  a 
rebellion.  Before  that,  I  was  interested  in  the  same  fundamental  ques- 
tion of  the  U.S.  involvement  in  Central  America  and  the  role  of  state 
violence  in  reproducing  society,  the  centrality  of  state  violence  in  pro- 
ducing the  every  day  world.  Even  though  we  don't  see  violence  all 
the  time,  I  really  think  that  in  many  ways  everyday  life  is  a  product 
of  state  violence.  That  it's  hidden,  ever  present,  and  in  a  way  ideo- 
logically with  us  all  -  all  the  time.  I  see  it  as  normal  that  Americans 
are  really  fascinated  with  violence,  and  college  students  want  to  take 
classes  on  serial  killers  and  everyone  is  trying  to  process  violence.  Of 
course  they  are,  because  even  though  we  don't  think  critically  about 
it,  we  all  know  through  a  sort  of  intellectual  background  noise  that 
this  whole  society  is  predicated  on  massive  genocide  and  land  theft 
and  continued  violence  all  the  time.  So  that  led  to  my  interest  in  the 
criminal  justice  system. 

During  your  talk  you  mentioned  that  Clinton  has  done  more  to  in- 
crease the  criminal  justice  system  build-up  than  any  other  president 
has.  What  is  some  specific  legislation  attributed  to  Clinton? 

Clinton's  1994  Crime  Bill  was  the  beginning  of  the  really  horrible 
federal  crime  bills.  It  made  30  billion  dollars  available  for  grants  for 
policing  and  prison  construction.  The  material  impact  of  that  bill  was 
far  greater  than  any  other;  the  amount  of  money  in  absolute  relative 
terms  was  enormous.  The  federal  Anti-terrorism  and  Death  Penalty 
Act  greased  the  wheels  of  the  federal  death  penalty  in  a  way  that  no 
republican  bill  had. 

There  was  also  the  Prison  Litigation  Reform  Act,  a  little  knovsn 
piece  of  legislation  that  completely  overhauled  prisoners  access  to 
civil  courts  in  really,  really  bad  ways.  It  has  a  three  strikes  provision  so 
that  if  a  prisoner  has  three  court  cases  thrown  out  of  court  as  frivolous, 
then  they  lose  forever  their  right  to  file  another  case.  And  you  have 
to  remember  that  a  lot  of  people  enter  prison  functionally  illiterate. 
And  then  they  have  to  teach  themselves  how  to  read,  and  then  they 
have  to  teach  themselves  the  law  using  inadequate  law  libraries  and 
inadequate  office  supplies.  So  they  are  submitting  briefs  that  are  tech- 
nically pretty  shabby  and  can  be  thrown  out  on  a  technicality.  So  it's 
not  that  prisoners  are  filing  fri\olous  briefs  often.  They  are  frequently 
filing  briefs  because  they  are  autodidacts  that  get  thrown  out.  So  that 
IS  a  really,  really  bad  provision  of  the  law  becau.se  it  frees  prison  ad- 
ministrators to  abu.se  prisoners  and  not  be  held  accountable.  Another 
thing  thai  it  docs  is  it  eliminates  attorney  fees  so  lawyers  can't  get  paid 
for  taking  prison  cases,  so  there  is  a  fundamental  point  there:  The  sort 


of  quality  control  aspect  of  the  law  has  been  removed.  Whatever  you 
want  to  say  about  the  United  States  justice  system,  at  least  there  were 
these  nominally  built  in  quality  controls  so  that  at  least  the  people  who 
are  subject  to  the  law  have  recourse  to  question  the  law  and  point  out 
its  failures.  That's  been  rolled  back  by  the  Prison  Litigation  Reform 
Act. 

The  essential  argument  in  your  hook  Lockdown  America  is  that  capi- 
talism contains  contradiction:  it  both  needs  poverty  and  is  threatened 
by  it.  My  question  is  how  does  the  War  on  Drugs  play  into  the  contain- 
ment of  this  threatening  lower  class? 

The  War  on  Drugs  contains  the  lower  classes  by  justifying  repression 
of  the  poor  in  seemingly  apolitical,  technical  terms.  It  takes  it  out  of 
the  realm  of  racial  and  class  control  and  puts  it  into  the  discursive 
realm  of  public  safety.  It  is  a  massive  ideological  justification  for  com- 
ing down  on  those  classes  which  do  or  could  potentially  threaten  the 
system.  So,  fundamentally  that's  how  the  War  on  Drugs  fits  into  the 
larger  project  of  social  control,  that  is  to  say  the  larger  project  of  hav- 
ing poverty  while  containing  the  deleterious  side  effects  of  poverty, 
such  as  rebellion.  That's  what  it's  about.  How  it  does  that,  as  every- 
body knows,  is  through  an  ideological  campaign  that  constructs  drug 
dealers  and  drug  users  as  poor  people  of  color  and  it  constructs  the 
drugs  used  in  inner  cities  as  the  more  dangerous  drugs.  There  is  a  long 
history  of  that. 

The  first  War  on  Drugs  started  in  San  Francisco  in  the  1870s 
against  Chinese  laborers.  There  were  laws  against  smoking  opium, 
which  is  what  the  Chinese  laborers  did.  whereas  everyone  else  was 
drinking  opium  tonics  sold  over  the  counter  The  issue  wasn't  opium 
addiction,  it  was  Chinese  laborers  being  in  California,  settling  down 
and  starting  to  think  that  perhaps  they  had  some  right  to  own  property 
and  make  some  decisions  for  themselves  and  question  their  treatment. 
There  was  a  very  racist  worker's  movement  at  that  time.  The  Working- 
man's  Party,  and  simultaneously  at  that  time,  you  get  the  first  anti-drtig 
laws  in  the  U.S. 

The  following  War  on  Drugs  was  in  the  1930s  during  the  De- 
pression when  Harry  Anslinger  came  down  on  marijuana,  which 
was  really  about  coming  down  on  Mexican  and  African-.American 
migrant  laborers.  Mexican  migrant  laborers  were  coming  into  work 
in  the  fields  of  the  South  and  California.  African-Americans  were 
increasingly  moving  North  into  industrial  areas.  Marijuana,  which 
was  previously  known  as  hemp,  was  used  more  often  b>  Mexicans 
and  African-.Americans  than  by  the  white  industrial  working  class 
in  the  North.  So  Harry  Anslinger  really  focuses  on  that  and  actually 
gets  the  name  changed  to  marijuana  because  it  gives  the  drug  a  more 
foreign  ambiance  and  associates  it  more  directly  w  ith  Mexicans  be- 
cause it  is  a  Spanish  name.  He  launches  a  war  on  marijuana  attribut- 
ing it  with  all  sorts  of  crazy  properties  which  you  can  see  in  movies 
like  Reefer  Madness  —  things  like  it  makes  proper  white  girls  want 
to  have  sex. 

So  that  was  really  about  controlling  a  certain  raciali/ed  class 
of  people,  and  so  too  now  we  see  the  media  constructing  crack  co- 
caine as  this  super  horrible  drug  ...  and  crack  is  a  bad  drug,  but  so 
is  alcohol.  I  mean  alcohol  is  heavy-duty  stuff.  One  of  my  first  jobs 
out  of  high  school  was  working  in  a  homeless  shelter  for  alcoholics. 
Alcohol  makes  people  do  really  cra/y  \  iolent  stutT  and  it  destroys 
you  physically.  The  etTect  that  alcohol  has  on  fetuses  is  unparalleled. 
They  now  know  that  so-called  "crack  babies"  recover  fully.  You  can't 
say  the  same  for  children  born  w  ith  Fetal  Alcohol  Syndrome.  So  it's 
not  about  the  actual  nature  of  the  drug,  not  to  minimi/c  the  fact  that 
all  drugs  can  be  damaging.  I  ven  benign  little  marijuana  can  mess  up 
your  lungs  and  luni  you  into  a  mush\  headed  slacker,  .\lcohol  can 
kill  you,  heroine  can  kill  you.  cocaine  can  drive  you  crazy  and  kill 
\ou  .Ml  these  drugs  when  abused  become  problematic.  The  point  is 
that  how  thev  uet  constructed  in  the  media  has  more  to  do  with  the 


way  that  the  story  can  be  utilized  by  law  enforcement  to  control  the 
poor,  particularly  poor  people  of  color. 

Lockdown  America  makes  the  case  that  poor  people  of  color  particu- 
larly suffer  in  the  restructuring  of  the  economy  and  therefore  make  up 
the  hulk  of  America  s  prisoners.  How  would  you  say  this  affects  com- 
munities of  color  in  general? 

The  War  on  Drugs  affects  them  in  horrible  ways.  There  is  a  special 
aspect  to  that  as  well.  The  War  on  Drugs  and  criminal  justice  doesn't 
take  place  evenly  over  space,  it  takes  place  unevenly  because  capi- 
talism has  an  uneven  geography  and  produces  spaces  unevenly.  You 
have  the  overdevelopment  of  some  areas  and  the  underdevelopment  of 
others,  exploitation  in  some  areas,  the  accumulation  of  intense  capital 
in  certain  places  such  as  cities  and  the  extraction  of  capital  from  other 
places.  So  too  do  state  policies  take  place  unevenly  because  there  is  a 
geographic  aspect  to  it.  So  most  criminal  justice  takes  place  in  cities, 
though  there's  a  War  on  Drugs  in  the  country  like  the  big  anti-marijua- 
na campaigns  throughout  Appalachia  and  the  Northwest.  But  a  lot  of 
this  is  about  controlling  places  ...  cities,  where  the  poor  of  color  live. 
Criminal  justice  creates  deviancy;  it  damages  people.  You  send  young 
people  to  prison  and  they  come  out  screwed  up  and  more  likely  to 
commit  violent  crimes.  They  will  also  be  shut  out  of  the  labor  market 
because  employers  don't  want  to  hire  felons.  So  this  helps  increase  un- 
employment which  increases  interpersonal  violence,  all  of  which  then 
seems  natural  and  Justifies  greater  use  of  policing  and  incarceration.  It 


opens  these  communities  up  to  police  surveillance  and  it  divides  these 
communities  by  helping  to  create  a  crisis  of  violence  and  crime.  Many 
people  in  poor  inner  city  communities  really  want  the  police  to  be 
there.  They  want  more  repression  and  they're  in  favor  of  having  the 
cops  come  in  and  do  whatever  "needs  to  be  done."  So,  it  affects  these 
communities  by  putting  them  under  occupation  and  dividing  them, 
demoralizing  the  people  there  and  siphoning  off  the  youth.  I've  had 
community  organizers  talk  about  how  they  compete  for  personnel 
with  the  drug  trade.  The  young  don't  get  involved  in  organizing  be- 
cause they  either  get  involved  in  the  drug  trade  or  end  up  in  prison. 
So,  it  removes  a  demographic  slice  of  the  population,  the  young, 
who  are  frequently  crucial  to  any  project  of  political  organizing. 

Could  you  tell  me  a  little  hit  about  the  War  on  Youth? 

John  Diuilio,  the  right-wing  criminologist  who  first  wrote  about  "su- 
per-predators" is  in  many  ways  responsible  for  the  ideological  climate 
behind  the  War  on  Youth.  There's  this  fear  that  youth  are  out  of  control 
and  difTerent  from  youth  of  the  past,  which  is  in  fact  a  perennial  fear. 
Every  generation  has  the  idea  that  the  youth  this  time  around  are  pro- 
foundly damaged  and  different  from  other  people,  and  to  some  extent 
I  think  this  is  borne  out  of  capitalism  and  the  rapid  rate  of  change 
that  always  occurs  under  industrialized  capitalism.  It's  an  expression 
about  people's  deeper  anxieties  about  how  society  is  constantly  de- 
stroying and  inventing,  then  destroying  and  reinventing  traditions  and 
geographic  patterns  and  psychological  patterns.  The  whole  culture  of 


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late  industrial  capitalism  is  marked  by  creative  destruction  produc- 
ing tastes,  places,  cultures  and  belief  systems  —  all  of  which  are  also 
commodities  and  forms  of  production.  So  that  concern  and  fear  about 
youth  is  perennial.  You  can  find  the  same  kind  of  discourse  going  back 
a  hundred  years.  More  specifically,  the  War  on  Youth  part  of  it  has  to 
do  with  the  fact  that  we've  run  out  of  ways  to  come  down  on  adults. 
There  are  just  so  many  laws  they  can  pass. 

There  is  one  thing  I  would  say  about  the  War  on  Youth  that 
activists  sometimes  miss  the  point.  The  real  thing  oppressing  youth 
in  California  for  example  is  not  the  fact  that  they  are  youth,  although 
they  are  oppressed  as  youth  because  they  have  these  curfew  laws. 
Their  schools  arc  being  militarized,  they  can't  skateboard,  etc.  The 
facets  of  youth  culture  are  increasingly  criminalized  simply  for  be- 
ing youth.  But  the  main  thing  that's  criminalizing  youth  is  the  fact 
that  they  are  working  class  and  people  of  color.  And  1  think  there 
is  some  fetishization  of  youth  that  goes  on  sometimes  on  the  Left. 
People  need  to  think  a  little  more  critically  about  that  because  youth 
are  also  some  of  the  most  privileged  people  in  this  society,  and  that 
youth  is  as  much  a  source  of  privilege  as  a  source  of  oppression. 
This  whole  society  is  youth  identified.  Consumer  culture  is  based 
around  images  of  youth,  and  youth  have  a  certain  cultural  cache  and 
a  certain  cultural  capital  that  works  for  them  in  capitalism.  The  real 
fundamental  issues  are  ultimately  questions  of  gender  location,  class 
and  race.  That's  not  to  say  that  there  aren't  laws  that  target  youth, 
but  sometimes  people  fctishize  youth  when  the  fact  is  it's  not  their 
youthfulness,  it's  their  other  qualities  that  are  really  the  reason  the 
cops  are  coming  down  on  them. 

Whal  would  you  say  to  someone  who  thinks  thai  prison  labor  is  a 
good  use  of  prisoners  and  is  in  fact  a  form  of  rehabilitation  because  it 
provides  them  with  job  skills? 

All  of  that  can  be  true.  The  more  fundamental  issue  is  who's  in  prison 
and  do  they  need  to  be  rehabilitated?  Do  people  who  have  been  busted 
for  growing  a  little  bit  of  marijuana  need  rehabilitation  and  job  skills? 
I  doubt  it.  The  fundamental  issue  before  you  even  get  to  the  question 
of  could  there  be  good  prison  labor  or  not  is  the  fact  that  there  are  way 
too  many  people  in  prison  that  don't  need  to  be  there.  Thirty  percent 
of  people  who  enter  prison  enter  for  violent  crimes;  the  rest  enter  for 
nonviolent  property  otTenses,  nonviolent  drug  offenses  and  public  or- 
der offenses.  In  my  opinion,  the  majority  of  those  people  should  not  be 
going  to  prison.  So,  that's  the  trump  card  in  that  argument. 

The  other  night  you  mentioned  that  even  some  of  the  most  "tough  on 
crime  "  lawmakers  are  now  calling  for  a  stabilizing  of  the  prison  build- 
ing momentum.  How  do  you  see  this  "elite  rethink.  "  as  you  called  it. 
affecting  the  prison  industiy? 

Its  hard  to  predict  the  future.  Maybe  we'll  just  see  a  slowing  in 
the  rate  of  growth  of  incarceration.  We're  already  seeing  a  slow- 
ing compared  to  the  '9()s.  Maybe  we'll  see  the  whole  project  of  re- 
pression plateau  and  stabilize.  The  middle  class  might  decide  that 
they  don't  want  to  pay  for  this.  Or  maybe,  if  there's  enough  pressure 
from  below  and  if  there's  enough  constituencies  in  society  that  ad- 
dress criminal  justice  —  for  example  if  the  labor  movement  gets 
involved  and  sees  this  as  an  issue  of  their  future  membership  base 
being  robbed,  we  might  see  a  positive  rollback  against  the  criminal 
justice  system  build-up.  But  I  don't  know.  It's  all  a  question  of  how 
much  people  organize,  how  creatively  people  organize,  and  when 
they  do  organize,  how  broadly  they  talk  about  and  think  about  the 
problem.  1  think  its  important  to  see  organizing  always  as  a  medium 
or  platform  for  education  as  well;  and  the  more  sophisticated  our 
narrative  I  think  the  more  people  will  understand  the  whole  society 
and  get  involved,  aiul  the  more  creali\e  forms  of  organization  we'll 
find.  So  if  we  can  keep  doing  the  job  and  increasingly  do  it  belief. 


if  we  can  be  less  single-issue  oriented,  less  moralistic,  think  more 
structurally,  think  about  capitalism  more;  less  about  bad  corpora- 
tions and  more  about  the  corporate  system,  i.e.  capitalism,  and  how 
the  capitalistic  society  constructs  everything  from  space  to  people's 
psychology,  and  then  keep  plugging  away  wherever  possible;  then 
it's  not  inconceivable  that  we  could  create  some  real  victories. 

/  think  people  are  interested  in  your  vision  of  a  criminal  justice  system 
and  the  role  of  prisons  in  a  just  society.  Can  you  elaborate? 

That's  such  a  hard  question  because  ideally  there  wouldn't  be  repres- 
sion, but  that's  pretty  Utopian.  1  think  that  there  is  a  place  for  groups  of 
people  to  decide  how  to  punish  and  deal  with  elements  of  that  group 
that  go  against  it.  I  think  to  deny  that  question  and  let  yourself  drift  off 
into  some  totally  Utopian  position  is  just  silly.  The  fact  of  the  matter 
is  that  people  have  always  done  bad  stutT and  even  in  a  Utopia  there 
would  have  to  be  some  system  for  dealing  with  people  who  kill  and 
rape  and  all  that.  Presumably,  there  w  ould  be  much  less  of  that.  We 
have  evidence  that  the  more  egalitarian  and  just  a  society,  the  less  in- 
terpersonal violence  there  is.  So,  it  becomes  a  kind  of  esoteric  question 
if  not  that  many  people  are  harming  others.  But  there  still,  nonetheless, 
would  have  to  be  a  system.  Even  very  egalitarian  indigenous  societies 
had  systems  of  banishment  and  that  sort  of  stufT.  So,  it's  an  ugly  fact 
that  groups  do  protect  themselves  through  shaming  and  forms  of  basi- 
cally what  you'd  have  to  call  repression.  When  a  hunting  and  gather- 
ing society  banishes  because  they've  committed  murder,  that's  a  form 
of  repression.  The  individual  is  being  driven  from  their  society.  Basi- 
cally. 1  don't  think  that's  a  relevant  question,  ultimately  because  it's 
completely  academic.  It's  completely  scholastic  because  it's  not  on  the 
agenda.  We  are  so  far  from  there  being  a  just  society  and  thus  actually 
having  to  work  out  a  system  of  restorative  justice  that  1  don't  think 
it's  relevant.  I  think  it's  O.K.  to  not  answer  that  question.  There  are 
all  sorts  of  questions  that  arc  O.K.  to  not  answer  because  they  don't 
have  any  material  bearing  on  the  current  movement.  \\  hat  we  ha\e  to 
deal  with  now  is  a  creep  towards  fascism  in  the  U.S.  An  increasingly 
punitive,  increasingly  racist  state  that  is  ever  more  invasive  in  terms 
of  surveillance  and  the  types  of  formal  and  informal  social  control  it 
exercises  o\er  all  of  us.  .'\nd,  frighteningly,  this  system  of  repression 
has  broad  support  among  the  people  of  America.  People  of  all  classes 
and  races  are  unfortunately  supportive  of  this.  So.  that's  the  real  issue. 
These  questions  are  academic  w hereas  the  questions  of  how  we  deal 
with  the  prison-industrial-complex  and  the  criminal  justice  build-up 
is  not  academic.  It's  ver\  real,  it's  very  immediate  and  it  may  seem 
vague  but  it's  a  really  practical  question  w  hereas  the  other  is  not.  "if 

Freja  Joslin  is  a  graduate  student  in  social  justice  education  and  a 
future  high  .school  social  studies  teacher  in  Tucson.  .Arizona.  Her  in- 
terests include  critical/radical  pedagogy  and  involving  young  people 
in  working  for  social  change. 


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boots  riley 

interview  and  photo  not4prophet 

originally  prmieu  in 

Clamor  #11Nov/Dec  2001 


The  Coup  has  been  around  from  the  days  of  conscious  hip  hop  through  gangsta  rap  and  the  co-opted  ©rap  that  cur- 
rently passes  for  culture,  and  has  lived  to  tell  a  story  of  the  streets,  survival  and  socialism.  For  The  Coup,  revolution 
is  rap  and  resistance,  but  never  rhetoric.  In  their  music,  they  talk  about  life  and  liberation  and  all  those  other  little 
things  that  usually  slip  through  the  collective  cracks  of  our  commercialized  consciousness.  The  Coup  wanna  kill  their 
landlord  and  the  CEO  and  encourage  you  to  steal  their  album  while  you're  sippin'  on  that  ghetto  glass  of  genocide  and 
juice.  Yeah,  they're  real,  and  they  believe  in  armed  struggle  too,  but  it's  a  war  against  who  stole  the  soul  and  ripped 
off  the  rhyme.  I  met  with  Boots  Riley,  the  leader  of  the  Coup,  in  some  posh  apartment  somewhere  in  downtown  New 
York/Babylon  where  neither  of  us  seemed  to  belong  to  preach  politics  for  the  people  and  play  a  little  party  music. 


The  Coup  has  existed  for  over  10  years  so  you  've  essentially  seen  every- 
one from  Chuck  D  and  BDP  to  the  X-Clan  and  Wu-Tang  Clan,  hut  I  think 
when  it  comes  to  hip  hop.  a  lot  of  folks  'memories  only  go  as  far  as  MTV 
and  Eminem.  So  who  stole  the  soul? 

1  think  the  whole  way  that  the  history  of  hip  hop  is  being  told  to  peo- 
ple right  now  is  a  kind  of  cooptation  or  theft  in  and  of  itself  They've 
essentially  taken  hip  hop  away  from  the  source  that  it  came  from  and 
whitewashed  it  so  it  no  longer  has  a  clear  history  and  origin,  so  we 
become  almost  stripped  of  our  collective  memory,  but  hip  hop  is  not 
just  a  series  of  accidental  occurrences  where  somebody  moved  from 
here  to  there  and  put  the  peanut  butter  in  the  chocolate  and  then  you 
had  hip  hop.  When  1  was  in  Detroit,  the  thing  was  hamboning  before 
I  ever  heard  anybody  rap  —  this  was  in  '75,  '76  —  so  when  I  first 
heard  Sugar  Hill  Gang,  1  was  like,  "Hey,  they  got  a  hambone  record 
on  the  radio,"  but  nobody  ever  talks  about  things  like  that.  Hip  hop 
is  not  just  a  series  of  things  that  happened  with  a  few  people.  It's  not 
just  what  you  see  on  TV.  For  what  hip  hop  is  today,  you  have  to  give 
props  to  those  people  that  helped  it  to  become  what  it  is. 

So  what  would  he  the  reason  for  blurring  the  histon'  of  hip  hop? 

It's  an  attempt  to  commodity  the  art  or  culture  so  that  they  can  sell  it, 
like  anything  else.  It's  much  easier  to  sell  a  simplified,  watered-down 


version  of  anything  than  to  deal  with  the  real  history  and  the  complica- 
tions and  questions  that  may  exist.  Even  the  idea  that  the  four  elements 
are  all  that  drove  and  comprised  hip  hop  is  basically  a  way  to  corn- 
modify  it.  To  be  able  to  separate  something  in  such  rigid  categories  is  in 
keeping  with  the  way  that  they  sell  anything. 

/n  terms  of  the  history  of  hip  hop  and  artists  like  Public  Enemv  or  KRS 
who  helped  to  pioneered  political  hip  hop.  I  don  't  see  an  awful  lot  of 
politicking  these  days.  What  happened  to  "I  'm  a  rebel  so  I  rebel "? 

I  think  right  now  with  the  lack  of  a  Black  mass  movement  out  there,  and 
with  the  fact  that  things  are  just  getting  worse  economically  for  people, 
we're  more  and  more  —  outside  and  inside  of  hip  hop  —  being  taught 
to  embrace  everything  that  is  wrong  with  this  capitalist  system.  We're 
essentially  being  told  that  it's  cool  to  have  a  poster  of  Bill  Gates  on  our 
ceiling  and  jerk  off  to  him  every  night  and  we  are  being  convinced  that 
Donald  Trump  and  his  type  are  some  kind  of  social  superhero,  so  for 
many  people,  images  in  hip  hop  of  someone  that  has  a  million  dollars 
are  the  only  liberating  images  that  they've  ever  seen  in  their  lifetime.  It's 
the  only  image  they've  seen  of  someone  that's  free  from  oppression.  A 
lot  of  people  are  latching  onto  that  simply  because  there  is  no  movement 
that  they  see,  so  they  are  believing  in  the  American  dream  that  anybody 
can  become  a  millionaire  and  that's  what  some  of  that  hip  hop  that  exists 
today  is  there  to  affirm,  but  it's  really  just  telling  of  the  fact  that  there  is 


h 


o 
o 


N 


o 
o 


O 


no  movement  out  there.  When  they  see  that  someone  has  a  mansion  and 
a  big  car,  it's  almost  like  they're  witnessing  power  that  they've  never 
seen  and  never  had  access  to.  It's  not  a  real  image  but  they  think  that  it's 
a  liberating  image.  That's  liberation  as  far  as  they're  concerned. 

There  was  a  rime  when  some  of  us  thought  that  the  Hip  Hop  Nation  itself 
could  he  that  new  revolutionaiy  movement,  hut  now  we  're  saying  that 
there's  no  movement  thai  can  move  hip  hop  in  a  politically  conscious  or 
revolutionaiy  direction. 

Hip  hop  is  not  a  movement  in  and  of  itself.  Hip  hop  is  not  separate  from 
the  people.  Hip  hop  was  and  has  always  been  an  outgrowth  of  people's 
struggles.  It's  an  outgrowth  of  where  the  people  arc.  The  idea  that  they 
were  putting  out  there  that  there's  a  separate  Hip  Hop  Nation  or  what- 
ever, and  inside  this  Hip  Hop  Nation  everything  is  politically  perfect 
and  The  Nation  will  go  this  way  or  that  way  and  lead  the  people,  is  an 
outgrowth  of  the  fact  that  they  tried  to  make  hip  hop  seem  like  it  wasn't 
an  outgrowth  of  the  people. 

Within  the  underground  punk  culture,  there  is  this  idea  that  you  are  au- 
tomatically a  sell  out  if  you  go  to  a  major  label  but  within  hip  hop.  that 
never  really  existed  and.  in  fad,  the  underground  is  often  simply  per- 
ceived as  a  kind  of  minor  league  from  where  you  will  one  day  get  signed 
and  step  off  into  the  majors,  and  many  hip  hop  artists  will  say  that  they 
are  simply  liying  to  get  by  or  find  a  way  to  survive,  and  so  the  majors 
are  just  another  way  to  gel  paid.  Do  you  feel  there 's  a  need  for  hip  hop 
lo  liy  to  become  more  independent'? 

1  look  at  it  like  this  —  we're  inside  capitalism  already  so  we  have  to 
deal  realistically  with  what  we've  got.  The  ditTerence  between  indie  as 
opposed  to  major  mostly  has  to  do  with  the  fact  that  if  you  own  that 
indie  label  then  you'll  get  more  money  from  what  you  are  putting  out. 
You  may  also  initially  have  greater  control  over  what  you  do,  but  the 
markets  are  still  ruled  by  the  major  labels  who  control  the  gatekeepers 
of  the  industry  so  if  you're  an  indie  and  you  pose  a  threat,  you  can  still 
be  easily  shut  down  by  the  majors,  but  definitely,  it  would  be  better  if  hip 
hop  artists  had  more  control  of  what  they  create.  It  would  also  be  bet- 
ter if  Black  people  had  more  control  over  what  they  create,  but  owning 
your  own  indie  label  is  not  necessarily  a  revolutionary  concept  in  and  of 
itself  It's  really  just  a  matter  of  tactics  as  opposed  to  being  this  great  lib- 
erating thing.  Certainly  I  don't  like  the  monopoly  that  the  corporations 
have,  but  1  think  it's  kind  of  a  false  idea  that  because  it's  an  indie  label, 
it's  somehow  a  more  progressive  label. 

Talking  about  The  Coup,  who  have  been  back  and  forth  between  major 
and  indie  labels,  or  Dead  Prez,  for  instance,  who  are  on  a  major  label, 
you  definitely  have  a  question  of  access.  Although  Dead  Prez  are  still 
not  being  heard  as  much  as,  .say  Jay  Z  or  Puff  Daddy,  they  still  have 
a  relationship  with  the  big  boys  who  essentially  control  the  radio,  TV 
and,  potentially,  billions  of  dollars  in  advertising.  So  the  question  is, 
would  Dead  Prez,  who  are  getting  .tome  above  ground  recognition,  be 
a  total  obscurity  if  they  were  on  an  indie  label  that  didn  I  have  all  that 
corporate  power  and  if  they  were  on  an  indie  label,  would  that  mean 
that  there 's  that  many  less  people  who  could  hear  what  they  are  trying  to 
do  and  the  vital  message  that  they  're  trying  lo  put  forth  in  terms  of  the 
movement  and  the  struggle? 

Of  course  there's  a  lot  of  irrelevant  music  being  put  out  by  the  majors, 
but  is  what's  being  put  out  by  the  indies  automatically  more  progres- 
sive than  the  shit  the  majors  are  putting  out'.'  If  we're  talking  strictly 
capitalism  or  entrepreneurial  enterprises,  then  yeah,  the  indies  are  it, 
but  if  we're  talking  about  the  real  struggle  and  the  fact  that  our  people 
have  historically  been  denied  access  then  the  question  becomes  "What 
are  you  doing  \s  ilh  that  extra  money  you're  making  with  that  no  sell  out 
uidie  label.'"  Arc  you  usnig  it  to  finance  the  revolution .'  Are  you  using  it 


to  create  food,  shelter  and  clothing  for  people  besides  yourself?  Are  you 
using  it  to  educate  the  masses  on  the  streets?  And  what  is  your  overall 
message,  anyway?  Is  it  revolutionary?  Or  is  it  the  same  old  shit?  Truth 
is,  many  times  indie  labels  are  just  aspinng  to  be  major  labels  and  they 
don't  necessarily  give  a  damn  what  they're  putting  out  and  putting  forth 
as  long  as  it  sells,  so  being  part  of  an  indie  label  is  not  in  and  of  itself 
some  sort  of  revolutionary  act. 

By  the  time  The  Coup  came  into  existence  in  the  early  '90s,  many  of  the 
so-called  conscious  hip  hop  artists  were  no  longer  .selling  and  so-called 
gangsta  rap  ruled  the  roost. 

Yeah,  there  weren't  too  many  people  doing  politically-minded  music  on 
a  nationwide  basis,  but  the  way  we  looked  at  it  was  that  we  were  coming 
at  it  from  the  same  angle  as  artists  who  were  being  called  gangsta  rap.  If 
you  really  looked  at  it.  we  were  all  just  talking  about  our  surroundings 
although  v\e  may  have  had  a  deeper  analysis  of  what  was  going  on  in 
our  surroundings.  If  you  really  listen  to  a  lot  of  music  that  people  don't 
classify  as  conscious  or  call  gangsta,  it's  simply  saying  that  these  are  the 
problems  we're  having  in  our  lives.  The  real  difference  is  not  the  content 
but  in  their  analysis  as  to  why  the  problems  are  happening,  but  the  gen- 
eral feel  of  most  of  it  is  that  I'm  giving  you  some  game  or  advice  as  to 
how  to  deal  with  the  problems  and  they're  all  coming  with  that,  whether 
they  are  called  gangsta  or  conscious.  I  think  the  only  ditTerence  is  that 
we  may  just  have  had  a  little  better  understanding  of  what  was  really 
going  on  in  this  world  from  a  revolutionary  point  of  view. 

Do  you  think  that  what 's  being  given  lo  us  by  the  major  labels,  as  far  as 
what  we  hear  on  the  radio  or  see  on  TV.  is  an  attempt  at  an  analysis  of 
what 's  going  on  or  is  it  simply  an  exaggeration  of  ghetto  life,  not  unlike 
what  you  might  see  in  a  cheap  horror  flick? 

There  are  a  lot  of  things  that  are  not  e\  en  attempting  to  pretend  to  be 
any  kind  of  real  analysis  of  what's  going  on  and,  in  many  cases,  they 
are  simply  a  saleable  product  like  a  horror  mo\  ie,  but  in  many  cases, 
what  people  —  artists  —  are  still  saying  is  that  this  is  what's  happening, 
this  is  our  reality,  like  it  or  not,  and  in  the  case  of  stuff  that  gets  called 
gangsta  rap  and  gets  written  off  as  nothing  more  than  a  felon  fairytale, 
they  are  actualK  trying  to  tell  you  that  these  are  the  problems  that  exist 
and  these  are  the  ways  to  survive  them,  like  it  or  not.  It  just  happens  that 
The  Coup's  way  to  survive  them  and  solve  our  problems  is  to  change  the 
system  from  top  to  bottom. 

Do  you  think  thai  people  have  been  getting  that  message? 

Yeah,  but  it's  really  not  just  a  maner  of  them  truly  understanding  w  hat  w  e're 
saying.  To  realK  understand  it.  you  ha\e  to  get  inxoKed  in  the  struggle 
around  something  that  deals  \\  ith  \ou  and  >our  life.  A  lot  of  times,  the  mis- 
take of  the  movement  is  that  we  tr>  to  make  the  struggle  nothing  but  a  bunch 
of  pic  in  the  sky  rhetoric.  You  know,  "When  the  revolution  comes  in  50 
years,  this  is  how  we'll  change  the  world."  and  w hat  this  dixrs  is  isolate  tlie 
movement  from  the  fact  that  the  struggle  for  revolution  is  a  matenal  strug- 
gle. It's  not  something  that's  based  on  an  emotion,  an  intangible  frvedom. 
or  anything  like  that.  Tlie  fact  is  that  people  need  fotxl,  people  need  clothes, 
they  need  healthcare,  they  need  shelter  and  those  are  matenal  things  and  we 
need  to  simgglc  around  those  matenal  things.  We  can't  just  stniggie  only 
around  world  trade  policies  and  things  like  thai  because  we  need  peitple 
involved  in  the  struggle  and  many  ptH)ple  are  just  trying  to  survive  day  to 
day.  We  need  to  get  in\ol\ ed  in  those  da\  to  da\  struggles  as  well,  so  that 
means  we  need  to  gel  more  monc>  per  hour  We  necil  to  keep  pa>ple  from 
being  e\  icted  from  their  homes.  Wc  need  to  show  the  [vople  that  there  are 
victones  coming  from  the  movement  and  tlien  people  will  connect  it  to, 
"Hey,  these  ideas  about  revolution  do  mean  something,"  so  when  they  hear 
a  Coup  song  or  a  Dead  Pav  song  or  Public  Fnem>.  the\  "a*  not  just  hearing 
these  nice  idea.s  tlial  don't  mciui  anything  to  them. 


So  the  music  becomes  a  kind  of  bridge  between  the  day  to  day  struggle, 
and  revolutionary  goals  and  ideas  and  ideals? 

Yes.  We  need  to  connect  the  larger  struggle  with  actual  campaigns  in 
the  community  and  music  can  help  provide  the  analysis  as  to  what  these 
struggles  are  all  about.  You  really  understand  what's  going  on  once  you 
get  involved  in  the  struggle  but  right  now  we're  giving  people  the  choice 
to  either  pledge  allegiance  to  the  revolution  or  blah  blah  blah.  It  ends  up 
being  almost  like  a  religion  instead  of  about  anything  real  so  that's  why 
people  gravitate  towards  songs  that  say,  "OK,  you  need  to  sell  dope  to 
solve  your  problems,"  because  you  can  sell  some  crack  for  S 1 0  and  have 
S 1 0  in  your  pocket  and  that's  a  material  thing.  The  movement  is  separat- 
ing itself  from  that  reality. 

So  why  has  the  political  movement  in  the  U.S.  separated  itself  from  the 
real  grassroots  struggle  in  the  streets? 

I  think  there  is  an  aesthetic  about  the  movement  right  now  that  has  to  do 
with  the  fact  that  there  are  a  lot  of  students  that  came  into  it  in  the  1960s 
and  although  that's  not  necessarily  a  bad  thing  —  because  in  other  parts 
of  the  world  it  helped  to  motivate  and  energize  the  movement  —  in  the 
U.S.,  the  student  movement  was  very  different  than  the  movements  all 
over  the  world  and  whereas  all  over  the  world  the  student  movements 
embraced  struggles  that  had  to  do  with  everyday  working  people,  here 
the  nature  of  what  people  were  struggling  around  ended  up  being  almost 
a  more  intellectual  endeavor,  things  that  didn't  have  to  do  with  everyday 
people,  whereas  if  you  look  back  into  the  '20s  and  '30s,  or  even  like  the 
labor  movement  in  the  United  States,  it  tended  to  deal  with  real  day  to 
day  issues.  If  you  can  get  50,  60  people  to  show  up  at  an  eviction  and,  as 
they  move  a  family's  furniture  out,  those  50  or  60  people  move  it  back 
in,  you're  dealing  with  real  world  struggles,  real  people's  struggles,  and 
then  people  see  that  the  movement  and  the  revolution  is  something  that 
is  material.  It'snotjust  something  that  sounds  like  a  good  idea  but  some- 
thing that  can  work. 

So  the  question  is  how  does  talking  about  and  fighting  for  possessions 
or  material  things  or  eating  or  survival  or  paying  your  rent  lead  to  an 
understanding  that  maybe  the  system  that  exists  now  is  what 's  keeping 
you  hungry  or  homeless?  How  do  we  make  it  understood  that  after  all 
is  said  and  done,  we  still  need  to  dismantle  and  destroy  the  system  that 
is  t lying  to  destroy  us? 

It's  just  like  learning  scales  on  the  piano.  You  don't  just  tell  someone  this 
is  how  the  piano  works  inside  and  that's  it  because  odds  are  they're  not 
going  to  be  interested  at  all.  Even  if  I'm  curious  about  how  the  sound 
vibrates  and  all  that,  I'm  still  not  going  to  be  interested  enough  to  absorb 
that  information,  but  when  they're  trying  to  figure  out  how  to  play  the 
piano  and  then  they're  learning  about  that,  then  you  really  start  to  take  in 
that  information.  It's  all  about  theory  and  practice.  The  only  way  people 
Icam  the  theory  is  to  practice  and,  in  terms  of  the  revolution,  that  prac- 
tice is  the  struggle  to  get  something  to  eat,  to  survive,  to  live.  Through 
practice  you  figure  out  how  the  system  works  and  that's  how  you  will 
eventually  figure  out  that  it  has  to  be  destroyed,  otherwise  it  becomes 
theoretical  and  not  connected  to  you  in  any  way  that  you  can  really  see, 
so  the  job  of  the  revolutionary  to  sum  up  these  things  that  are  happening, 
to  make  it  clear  just  what  and  why  this  is  happening.  This  is  what  the 
struggle  is  about. 

To  take  it  out  of  the  classrooms  and  into  the  streets. 

And  to  teach  through  actual  action.  Otherwise  it  becomes  something 
where  you  just  hand  people  books  and  they're  supposed  to  read  Marx, 
Lenin,  and  Mao  and  ingest  that  and  decide  whether  they  agree  with  this 
or  that  based  on  something  that  they're  not  involved  in,  but  all  they're 
really  doing  is  reading  a  book.  For  me,  just  from  personal  experience,  I 


was  in  study  groups  that  read  those  books  before  I  really  was  involved 
in  the  struggle  in  a  more  concrete  way.  It  really  didn't  start  mattering  to 
me  enough  to  really  look  closely  at  the  ideas  in  these  books  until  I  was 
involved  with  things  that  had  to  do  with  people's  everyday  lives,  but 
once  I  did  get  involved,  I  also  began  to  better  understand  the  general 
concepts.  It's  then  that  the  questions  start  sprouting  in  your  head  and 
you're  compelled  to  go  back  into  history  to  put  things  into  context. 

We  hear  a  lot  of  talk  about  how  you  don 't  see  as  many  black  and  brown 
faces  in  the  streets  when  you  look  at  the  movements  that  exist  today 
against,  say,  the  WTO  or  the  G8.  Do  you  feel  that  this  is  because  the 
activists  haven 't  found  a  way  to  connect  it  to  the  real  world  .struggle  of 
just  surviving  day  to  day? 

I  think  that  people  and  communities  of  color  are  active  around  a  lot 
of  different  things  but  it's  just  that  sometimes  Black  people  have  to  be 
more  practical  as  to  what  they  will  get  out  and  fight  for.  For  instance,  the 
WTO  demonstrations,  which  are  very  important,  would  easily  be  sup- 
ported by  the  people  on  the  bottom  rung  if  it  were  explained  to  them  in  a 
v\ay  that  made  practical  sense.  They'll  be  like,  "Yeah,  I'm  against  what 
the  WTO  is  doing,"  but  the  question  is,  do  they  feel  motivated  enough  to 
feel  that  they  can  change  things?  Has  it  been  explained  to  them  in  such  a 
way  that  they  feel  like  they  can  make  a  difference?  1  don't  think  people 
feel  that.  When  you  talk  about  struggles  that  are  more  practical  with  the 
day  to  day  battles,  when  you  tie  it  into  that,  then  people  will  understand 
why  you're  out  there  fighting  the  WTO. 

,4nd  then  support  that  aspect  of  the  movement? 

Realistically,  1  think  that  poor  people  are  more  likely  to  first  get  involved 
in  something  else  that  feels  closer  to  home,  but  that's  not  saying  that 
those  demonstrations  aren't  necessary  or  vitally  important,  because  they 
do  expose  a  lot  of  realities  to  people,  but  I  think  right  now  we  need  more 
conununity-based  reforms.  I  think  the  fact  that  we  are  not  more  clearly 
focusing  on  grassroots  actions  is  one  of  the  reason  why  the  numbers  are 
dwindling  in  the  movement. 

But  there  seems  to  be  this  political  dividing  line  between  fighting  the  big 
corporate  machine  or  fighting  for  basic  needs. 

So  there  ends  up  being  this  false  question  that's  come  up  in  the  last  20 
years  between  reform  or  revolution,  as  if  they  can't  go  hand  in  hand. 
That  was  never  a  question  until  very  recently.  It  was  always  a  battle  for 
reform  and  revolution. 

What  is  The  Coup  trying  to  do  musically  and  lyrically  in  terms  of  your 
message  to  create  the  link  between  reform,  or  changing  shit  in  the  streets 
and  the  eventual  dismantling  of  the  system? 

The  music  we  make,  our  party  music,  is  a  kind  of  platform  for  me  to 
talk  about  what  I  believe  needs  to  happen,  but  the  way  that  I  talk  about 
or  try  to  get  a  message  across  is  through  personal  trials  and  tribulations, 
things  that  I  go  through  and  the  things  that  I  have  to  deal  with.  I  try  to 
discuss  the  things  that  I  feel  are  important  to  me  and  I  have  to  just  trust 
that  these  are  things  that  everyone's  going  through.  Hopefijlly,  through 
my  analysis  of  my  own  personal  situation,  people  can  see  how  the  day  to 
day  struggle  connects  with  the  bigger  issue  ...  which  is  the  fact  that  the 
system  needs  to  be  destroyed,  ii 

Not4Prophet  is  the  lyricist  and  vocalist  of  the  political  punk/hip  hop/be  -^ 

bop/salsa/reggae  band  known  as  RJCANSTRUCTION.  He  is  also  the  ~ 

voice  of  the  "spoken  noise  "  group  RENEGADES  OF  PUNK,  and  fronts  g 
his  solo  anti-hip  hop  project  where  he  spits  rhymes  about  life,  liberty 

and  the  pursuit  of  poverty.  And  every  now  and  then  he  interviews  people  at 

that  he  likes.  o 


W 


o 
o 


derrick  Jensen 


interview  Sera  Bilezikyan 
illustratic   Joe  Adolphe 

origin^.,;  ^ ^^ .., 

Clamor  #11,Nov/Dec  2001 


Derrick  Jensen  is  a  writer  and  an  activist  on  behalf  of  forests,  salmon,  and  domestic  violence  survivors.  He  is  the 
author  of  Listening  to  the  Land  and  Railroads  and  Clearciits,  and  a  regular  contributor  to  The  Sun.  His  most 
recent  book,  A  Language  Older  Than  Words,  has  become  a  common  sight  in  the  hands  of  activists  and  anarchists  ev- 
erywhere. It  is  a  beautiful,  cyclical  narrative  combining  memoir,  politics,  and  philosophy  concerning  the  relationship 
of  humans  to  the  land  and  to  other  species  as  well  as  the  dangers  of  an  economic  system  that  dehumanizes  everything 
in  its  path.  Jensen  has  been  an  inspiration  to  radical  environmental  activists  for  years,  as  well  as  to  indigenous  people 
and  survivors  of  violence.  A  survivor  of  family  violence  himself,  he  has  been  described  as  one  who  has  "looked  evil  in 
the  face  yet  not  lost  his  capacity  to  love."  I  cannot  recommend  his  writings  enough,  to  anyone  who  cares  about  what  it 
means  to  rediscover  what  it  is  to  be  a  human  inextricably  connected  to  the  land,  in  a  society  which  has  done  everything 
to  destroy  that  connection,  to  make  the  decimation  of  all  communities,  ecological  and  social,  all  the  more  possible. 

This  interview  was  conducted  on  the  beach  near  Jensen's  home  in  Crescent  City,  California,  where  he  is  working 
on  a  new  book,  helping  to  restore  the  historic  salmon  runs,  and  teaching  writing  to  inmates  at  Pelican  Bay  State  Prison. 
He  recently  did  a  benefit  in  Eugene,  Oregon,  for  imprisoned  eco-activists  Free  and  Critter.  This  is  just  a  small  portion 
of  the  interview,  and  Jensen's  website,  www.derrickjensen.org,  can  give  further  background  on  his  work  and  current 
projects. 


I 


Is  writing  a  personal  outlet  for  internal  ideas  anJ  creativity  or  is  it  a 
necessity,  a  contribution  to  the  larger  struggle? 

Writing  is  definitely  how  I  contribute  and  communicate.  I  write  to 
bring  about  social  change  and  if  my  writing  doesn't  achieve  it  then  I 
am  going  to  attempt  to  achieve  social  change  through  other  means.  It's 
all  aimed  towards  bringing  down  civilization. 

f^'hen  did  you  start  writing'.' 

I  dedicated  my  life  to  writing  in  about  1987.  By  that  time  I  knew 
that  everything  in  the  culture  was  fucked  up,  but  I  didn't  have  an 
outlet  for  it.  Then  I  met  John  Osborn,  the  heart  and  soul  of  the 
Spokane,  Washington  environmental  community.  He  really  helped 


channel  my  energy.  1  had  this  huge  amount  of  pent-up  energy,  and  I 
didn't  know  where  to  take  it  and  what  to  do  with  it  ...  and  I  will  be 
forever  thankful  to  him  for  helping  me  find  direction.  So,  1  really 
started  writing  when  I  was  about  26.  And  I've  been  writing  more 
and  more  ever  since.  These  days  it's  pretty  much  all  I  do. 

When  I  wrote  Language,  1  had  this  Madison  Avenue  agent.  I  sent 
her  the  first  70  pages,  and  she  hated  it.  She  told  me,  "if  you  take  out 
the  social  criticism  and  the  stutT about  your  family,  I  think  you'll  have 
a  book."  She  told  me  this  on  April  22,  1997,  the  day  US-backed  troops 
in  Peru  slaughtered  the  Tupacamaristas.  I  emailed  her,  "if  they  are  go- 
ing to  give  their  lives,  the  least  1  can  do  is  tell  the  truth.  You're  fired." 
She  also  said  that  I  was  a  nihilist. 

There  s  nothing  wrong  with  that. 


o 

o 

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o 
o 


At  the  time,  I  didn't  even  know  what  it  meant.  I  looiccd  it  up  in  the 
dictionaiA.  The  first  definition  is  somebody  that  hates  life,  whieh  is 
obviously  not  me.  The  sceond  definition  is  somebody  who  thinks  so- 
ciety is  so  rotten  that  it  needs  to  be  taken  down  to  its  core,  which  is 
definitely  me.  What  all  of  this  means  is  that  I  really  want  to  write  for 
the  people  who  have  thought  about  it  all  for  a  long  time,  and  I  want 
to  push  them  further.  Push  them  harder,  push  the  analysis  harder.  For 
whatever  reason,  the  universe,  plus  my  family,  plus  everything  else 
have  made  it  so  I  have  the  capacity  to  look  at  these  things  and  analyze 
them;  so  goddamnit,  I  have  to. 

Do  you  consider  yourself  an  anarchist? 

That  depends  on  how  we  define  it.  I  like  John  Zerzan's  definition  of 
anarchist:  someone  who  wants  to  eradicate  all  forms  of  oppression.  In 
that  definition,  yes.  But  then  I  saw  this  article  the  other  day  in  Green 
Anarchy  saying  that  the  Zapatistas  aren't  anarchists. 

That  has  come  up  in  every  conversation  I  have  had  this  week. 

You  know  what?  I  don't  care  whether  the  Zapatistas  are  anarchists. 
There  is  definitely  a  strain  of  anarchism  that  can  get  kind  of  convo- 
luted and  silly.  But  I  think  that's  true  of  any  "ism."  Am  I  an  anarchist? 
Sure.  Am  1  an  anarchist?  No.  it  took  me  years  to  even  call  myself  a 
writer.  I'm  happy  to  publicly  associate  myself  with  anarchists,  and 
speak  out  in  support  of  the  ELF  (Earth  Liberation  Front)  and  the  ALF 
(Animal  Liberation  Front). 

Speaking  of  the  ELF,  do  you  believe  in  the  power  of  economic  sabo- 
tage as  a  tactic  to  slow  down  the  machine'.'' 

Yes,  I  think  that  is  a  wonderful  tactic  and  should  be  used  far  more  of- 
ten. The  problem  I  have  with  it  is  that,  and  1  will  talk  about  this  in  my 
next  book  I'm  going  to  write  this  fall,  I  think  it  needs  to  go  to  a  whole 
other  level.  What  we  do  far  too  often  is  endpoint  sabotage.  Destroying 
the  SUV  or  the  house  at  the  end.  So  is  tree  spiking,  which  I  think  is 
a  really  good  idea.  We  need  to  take  offensive.  We  need  to  begin  dis- 
mantling the  entire  economic  infrastructure.  Which  includes  chang- 
ing people's  hearts,  education — everything,  i  mean,  I'm  a  writer.  Of 
course,  I  have  no  problem  with  that.  There  is  another  level  that  needs 
to  be  happening.  We  need  to  recognize  that  ours  is  a  government  of 
occupation.  How  do  you  disable  the  infrastructure  of  this  country?  I 
don't  know.  That's  why  I  have  to  write  the  new  book.  Another  way  to 
say  this  is  that  1  perceive  a  lot  of  the  activities  of  the  ELF  as  "propa- 
ganda by  deed."  I  think  that's  incredibly  important,  but  1  would  also 
like  to  see  us  systematically  dismantle  the  economic  and  physical  in- 
frastructure of  this  civilization.  To  tell  the  truth,  I  don't  think  it  would 
take  that  many  people. 

Albert  Speer,  the  armaments  minister  for  the  Nazis,  wrote  that 
the  American  and  British  carpet  bombers  were  not  as  cfTcctivc  as 
they  could  have  been  because  they  would  target,  for  example,  a  trac- 
tor factory  which  would  make  it  so  the  Nazis  couldn't  build  engines 
for  their  tanks  and  airplanes.  But  they  didn't  hit  the  ball-bearing  fac- 
tory, which  would  have  made  it  so  they  couldn't  rebuild  the  tractor 
factory.  If  they  had  gone  for  the  bottlenecks,  they  would  have  been 
more  effective.  What  I  want  to  do  in  this  book  is  figure  out  where  the 
bottlenecks  are. 

H'hal  about  on  a  more  local,  immediate  scale? 

If  I  could  do  one  thing,  iiiinicdi;ilcly.  1  would  slop  miemational  trade. 
Most  of  the  countries  where  people  are  star\  ing  are  food  exporters.  In 
India,  at  least  a  couple  of  states  that  used  to  be  granaries  now  export  dog 
food  and  tulips  to  lurope.  So  the  point  is,  I  wduld  like  to  sec  it  escalate 
r.isi    I  .im  saying  this  in  full  cognizance  of  the  fact  that  the  repression 


will  be  increased  exponentially.  I  wish  somebody  would  have  acted  100 
years  ago. 

So  tell  me  about  your  new  hook. 

It's  called  The  Other  Side  of  Darkness,  or  maybe  The  Culture  of  Make- 
Believe,  or  maybe  The  Culture  of  Contempt,  or  maybe  Being  \'ot-Hu- 
man,  Being  Human.  In  other  words,  we  don't  yet  have  a  title.  It  starts 
out  as  an  exploration  of  hate  groups,  and  then  spreads  out  from  there  to 
examine  how  these  things  arise,  and  it  really  goes  after  the  main  causes 
of  atrocity,  which  are  economics  and  the  economic  system.  About  half- 
way through  the  book,  my  publisher  said,  "Well  you've  got  to  talk  about 
the  Nazis."  and  I  thought,  what  can  I  say  which  hasn't  already  been 
said?  Then  I  remembered  something  a  friend  said  years  ago,  which  was 
that  Hitler's  big  mistake  was  that  he  was  about  100  years  ahead  of  his 
time.  Assembly-line  mass  murder  is  the  endpoint  of  ci\  ilization.  One  of 
the  things  1  say  near  the  end,  is  just  think  about  how  much  Hitler  would 
have  accomplished  with  face-recognition  software  ...  DNA  testing  ... 
social  security  numbers  —  what  if  he  had  the  capacity  to  destroy  the 
planet,  w hich  he  did  not  have,  but  which  we  do. 

The  salmon  are  dying.  We're  changing  the  climate.  Earthworm 
populations  in  the  Midwest  are  disappearing.  I  picture  people  coming 
20,  30  years  later,  after  civilization  collap.ses.  and  they'll  be  reading 
some  old  book  anywhere  in  this  region,  up  the  coast,  and  they'll  say, 
"there  were  so  many  salmon  that  people  were  afraid  to  put  their  boats  in 
the  water  for  fear  they'd  capsize  ...  and  I'm  fucking  starv  ing  to  death. 

We  don't  have  to  wait  for  collapse;  we  have  to  actualize  it  now.  That 
doesn't  mean  timber  sale  appeals  are  worthless.  An  image  I  ase  for  that  a 
lot  is  Hammer  and  Anvil,  a  military  term  describing  what  Robert  E.  Lee 
used  at  the  battle  of  Chancellorsville,  where  the  anvil  is  a  defensive  force, 
and  the  hammer  is  an  offensi\c  force.  The  purpose  is  to  smash  the  enemy 
in  between.  I  \  iew  timber  sale  appeals,  working  at  rape  crisis  centers,  and 
so  on  as  the  anv  il — the  solidity — and  attacks  on  the  system  through  writ- 
ing or  blowing  up  dams  or  w  hatever  as  the  hammer. 

From  working  in  the  forest  defense  movement,  it  seems  like  there  is  a 
lot  of  deceit.  There  is  the  Forest  Service  selling  off  the  old-growth  for- 
ests (on  public  lands)  at  subsidized  prices  to  the  timber  corporations. 
And  then  this  mediarsensationalized  conflict  between  environmental- 
ists and  local  people.  And  then  the  harsh  reality  of  just  4  percent  of 
old-growth,  ancient  forest  stands  remaining,  and  an  economic  .system 
which  victimizes  rural,  poor  logging  and  mill  towns.  What  is  the  solu- 
tion to  this  impervious  forest  dilemma? 

I  don't  think  there  are  solutions.  Civilization  creates  no-win  situations, 
and  the  sooner  we  realize  that,  the  sooner  we  can  get  it  out  of  our 
minds  and  hearts  and  begin  the  task  of  dismantling  it.  It  specializes 
in  false  promises  and  destructive  bargains.  We  have  been  on  this  con- 
tinent for  less  than  500  years,  and  we  ha\e  rendered  a  good  portion 
of  the  water  undrinkable.  We  are  in  the  process  of  rendering  the  air 
unbreathable  for  those  with  pollution-induced  asthma,  cancer,  or  an> 
other  such  diseases  we  already  have.  We  sign  on  the  dotted  line  for 
aluminum  cans  and  find  that  salmon  arc  stolen  in  the  bargain.  We  take 
jobs  in  the  forest  and  the  forests  are  destroyed.  We  tuni  on  the  lights 
and  find  that  we  have  been  handed  poisons  that  last  a  thousand  human 
lifetimes.  How  is  it  possible  to  make  human  and  humane  choices — 
choices  that  benefit  ourselv  es  and  others  as  beings  w  hen  each  time 
we  sign  a  contract  we  find  ourselves  further  enslaved'.' 

Yes.  local  people  need  jobs  But  what  is  physical  reality'.'  The 
old  growth  is  gone.  Lets  talk  about  that.  Lets  at  lea.st  be  honest.  I 
don't  want  to  hear  any  phony  jobs-versus-spotted-owls  arguments 
we  have  to  talk  about  automation  .  we  have  to  talk  about  raw  log  ex- 
ports. If  were  not  going  to  speak  honestly  about  those  things,  I've  got 
iu>thing  to  say  to  you.  even  if  you're  some  local  guv  If  vou  are  going 
to  be  honest,  well,  then  let's  figure  out  what  the  hell  were  going  to  do 


about  it.  I  totally  support  local  farmers.  I  support  family  fanners,  inde- 
pendent loggers  in  their  struggles  against  the  agriculture  corporations, 
but  if  they  are  going  to  abuse  the  land,  I  will  not  support  them.  Ail  that 
said.  1  think  we  need  to  choose  our  targets.  It's  clearly  a  huge  waste  of 
time  to  fight  some  guy  who,  by  hand,  clearcuts  200  acres  a  year. 

Do  you  think  it  is  a  viable  thing  to  work  with  rural  people  who  are 
also  being  exploited  by  corporations  -  to  say,  look,  Plum  Creek  Timber 
Corporation  is  not  saving  the  land,  it's  not  saving  your  life? 

We've  got  nothing  to  teach  them.  They've  been  put  out  of  business  by 
Plum  Creek.  They  know  it  already.  1  am  all  in  fa\  or  of  local  economies, 
but  what  local  economy  ends  up  meaning  in  our  culture,  is  corporate 
control.  It's  all  a  big  excuse.  If  it's  really  a  local  economy,  that  would 
be  better.  But  even  so  we  have  to  remember  that  our  entire  economic 
system  causes  people,  rewards  people,  constrains  people,  and  forces 
people  to  destroy  their  own  backyards,  and  then  move  on  somewhere 
else.  I  worked  with  a  farmer  years  ago  who  said  "Cargill  gives  me 
two  choices,  I  can  cut  my  own  throat  or  they'll  do  it  for  me. ..."  These 
people  know  what's  going  on.  That's  why  when  I  talk  about  violence 
to  family  farmers  they  understand,  they've  experienced  this  in  their 
own  bodies.  They've  sat  there  with  a  shotgun  across  their  lap  and  an 
empty  bottle  of  Jack  Daniel's  on  the  floor  and  thought  about  whether 
or  not  to  put  the  shotgun  in  their  mouth.  For  many  environmentalists, 
it's  a  game. 

//  's  a  luxury  too.  A  privilege. 

Yes,  so  many  of  us  talk  about  how  we  feel  the  death  of  the  salmon  in 
our  bones  but  1  don't  see  me  taking  out  a  dam.  I  don't  see  you  taking 
out  a  dam.  1  have  no  patience  for  mainstream  environmentalists  who 
say  it's  so  horrible  to  even  think  about  violence.  I  mean,  what  does  the 
mother  grizzly  do? 

As  you  address  in  Language,  do  you  think  society-  is  in  a  serious  state 
of  Post-Traumatic  Stress  Disorder? 


our  imbeddedness  is  natural  —  any  institution,  any  artifact,  any  re- 
ligion. And  if  it  doesn't  do  that,  it  is  unnatural  to  the  degree  that  it 
doesn't.  A  chainsaw  is  unnatural  because  it  helps  us  to  forget  that  we 
are  imbedded  in  the  natural  world.  Let's  presume  for  a  second  that 
Christianity  or  Judeo-Christianity  made  sense  in  the  Middle  East — to 
move  it  from  there  to  here,  means  by  definition  that  it  is  a  religion  that 
is  separated  from  the  land.  And  it  is  thus  not  going  to  articulate  and 
help  one  to  realize  a  right  relationship  \\  ith  the  land. 

What  is  the  point  of  civilization?  The  point  of  civilization  is  for 
the  rich  to  acquire  more  —  it  is  for  the  comforts  and  elegancies  of  the 
few.  I've  been  reading  some  of  the  main  rationales  for  slavery  in  pre- 
Civil  War  America,  and  a  lot  of  them  were  refreshingly  honest.  They 
say  our  way  of  life  is  based  on  the  comforts  and  elegancies  of  the  few 
based  on  the  sweat  of  those  who  are  less  refined  than  we  are.  That  is 
the  point  of  civilization.  To  make  it  so  that  the  few  can  stand  on  the 
backs  of  the  poor  and  the  non-human,  who  are  also  less  refined. 

It  emerges  from  this  damaged  mindset  we  discussed  earlier  It  is 
a  manifestation  of  and  a  reinforcer  of  the  damaged  mindset  that  is  not 
capable  of  entering  fully  mutual  relationships,  and  perceives  that  all 
relationships  are  based  on  power  Civilization  is  a  social  organization 
that  is  based  on  the  flawed  belief  that  all  relationships  are  based  on 
power,  and  it  is  a  social  organization  that  maximizes  the  capacity  for 
those  on  the  inside  to  utilize  that  power  for  physical  comfort.  Religion 
often  (although  not  all  religion)  is  used  as  a  way  to  get  through  the 
misery  of  this  culture,  because  someday  you'll  be  connected.  I  want  to 
be  connected  now. 

With  PTSD.  the  fundamental  fear  is  relationship.  This  God  is 
really  like  an  abusive  father  I  love  looking  at  the  bible  in  terms  of 
abusive  family  dynamics;  the  comparisons  are  straight  one-to-one.  No 
wonder:  they  are  manifestations  on  different  levels  of  the  same  thing. 
Fear  of  relationship.  Fear  of  our  own  feelings.  Fear  of  what  it  would 
actually  mean  if  we  were  to  engage  another  being,  human  or  other.  It 
has  been  reinforced  over  time  so  that  we  have  forgotten  that  there  is 
even  any  other  way  to  be. 

IVhat  do  you  think  is  going  to  happen  in  the  next  40  or  50  years? 


That's  the  fundamental  unstated  thesis  of  Language.  We  have  it,  in- 
dividually and  collectively.  In  my  new  book,  I  talk  about  the  rules 
of  a  dysfunctional  family,  which  are  also  the  rules  of  a  dysfunctional 
society,  according  to  R.D.  Laing.  Rule  A  is:  Don  l  Rule  A 1  is:  Rule  A 
does  not  exist,  and  Rule  A2  is  never  discuss  the  existence  or  nonexis- 
tence of  Rules  A.  A I  and  A2.  We  can  spend  all  this  time  talking  about 
everything  in  the  world  but  that  which  is  important,  it  is  simply  the 
case  that  we  aren't  seeing  the  damage. 

Or  we  see  it  too  much;  you  show  .someone  a  forest  clear-cut,  an  animal 
in  a  lab.  and  they  get  shocked. 

That's  another  level  of  Post-Traumatic  Stress  Disorder. 

The   "the  problem  is  so  big.  what  am  I  supposed  to  do?  "  level. 

It  is  necessary  to  look  at  it,  and  then  go  through  it.  The  real  problem  is 
not  so  much  the  sorrow  or  the  pain,  it's  our  avoidance  of  it. 

You  talk  about  civilization  a  lot  and  its  implications  for  both  society 
and  the  environment.  What  roles  do  religion  and  civilization  play  in 
the  alienation  of  humans  to  the  land? 

It  seems  pretty  clear  to  mc  that  c\cr\'thing  comes  from  the  land. 
You've  heard  the  argument  that  since  humans  arc  natural,  and  humans 
invented  chainsaws,  then  chainsaws  are  natural?  I  thought  about  that 
for  years.  Because  we  are  imbedded  in  and  part  of  Xhc  natural  world, 
anything  that  helps  to  understand  and  reinforce  our  understanding  of 


An  increase  in  grinding  away  at  whatever  natural  and  human  diversity 
is  left.  People  will  lead  increasingly  miserable  lives,  not  paying  atten- 
tion as  long  as  they've  got  a  television.  I  think  about  all  of  these  people 
who  sit  in  front  of  their  TVs:  they  might  as  well  be  in  SHU  (isolation 
unit  at  Pelican  Bay).  Their  world  consists  of  the  space  between  the 
couch  and  the  TV.  I  do  not  see  us  having  a  transfonnation  to  a  sustain- 
able way  of  living  that  is  either  voluntary  or  that  maintains  capitalism 
or  industrialism.  1  see  the  next  1 00  years  being  pretty  nasty,  no  matter 
how  you  look  at  it. 

What  hope  do  you  have  for  the  future?  That's  kind  of  a  bleak  way  to 
look  at  it. 

I  don't  think  it's  my  perspective  that  is  bleak.  I  think  that  the  reality 
is  bleak  and  it  remains  bleak  whether  or  not  we  choose  to  look  at  it. 
1  don't  take  it  personally.  This  is  what  doesn't  paralyze  me.  My  hope 
is  that  salmon  survive.  My  hope  is  that  salmon  forgive  us.  My  hope 
is  that  [gesturing  to  the  sky]  this  family  of  brown  pelicans  survives, 
and  1  have  hope  for  that.  I  hope  that  people  sur\  ive  and  that  people 
remember,  releam  what  it  means  to  live  on  the  land.  So,  my  hope  is 
that  1  have  hope  in  the  particular  -it 

Activist,  traveler,  musician,  and  one  of  the  best  goddamned  writers  ST 
around.  Sera  lost  the  good  fight  on  January  12.  2002  when  she  took  rZ 
her  own  life,  (excerpted from  her  obituary  in  Slingshot  newspaper)  o 


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photo  by  Tracy  Moslovcii 


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, 


carol  leigh 


interview  Mary  Christmas 

originally  prinieo  in 

Clamor  #1 5  lul/Aug  2002 


Carol  Leigh  and  I  met  when  she  was  in  Philadelphia  this  past  winter.  By  some  stroke  of  miracle,  she  received  word  of 
my  newly  formed  organization,  SWAT  (Sex  Workers  Action  Team).  Naturally,  this  founder  of  the  sex  workers'  rights 
movement  contacted  us  (currently  the  only  union  in  town),  to  ask  if  we  would  join  her  at  the  debate  she  was  taping  for 
National  Public  Radio.  In  turn,  SWAT  invited  Carol  to  our  biweekly  meeting,  where  we  were  graced  with  photographs 
of  her  trips  around  the  world  and  a  miniature  lesson  in  movement  herstory. 

Reinventing  herself  under  the  title  "Scarlet  Harlot,"  Carol  Leigh  has  appeared  in  films  and  performances  for 
years,  as  well  as  on  the  steps  of  many  City  Halls,  with  the  intent  of  using  her  experiences  in  prostitution  to  empower 
others.  As  a  writer  and  organizer,  Carol  gives  voice  and  presence  to  the  millions  of  people  in  the  sex  industry  who 
can't  afford  to  "come  out  of  the  dressing  room."  By  coining  "sex  work,"  now  a  widely  used  term  encompassing  all 
sex  industry  fields,  Carol  Leigh  gave  us  a  collective  identity,  and,  for  the  first  time,  a  hope  of  unity. 

Instead  of  preparing  specific  interview  questions  for  Carol,  we  shared  an  informal  conversation  over  margaritas 
in  West  Philly. 


So.  Carol,  you  started  talking  about  how  your  sex  work  was  more 
nerve-racking  and  frustrating  when  you  were  doing  it.  and  how  now. 
in  retrospect,  it  seems  more  rosy  and  glorified.  Do  you  think  that  has  to 
do  with  the  fact  that  when  you  re  in  it,  there  s  the  threat  of  something 
bad  happening,  some  danger  —  even  if  there's  no  apparent  physical 
danger? 

That's  interesting.  Right,  yeah,  that's  true  ...  the  sense  of  danger.  And 
even  my  regular  client  —  I  could  imagine  that  maybe  he'd  turn  dan- 
gerous. In  some  ways,  if  I'd  seen  somebody  for  a  few  years,  I  pretty 
much  felt  safe  —  as  safe  as  1  could.  1  mean,  I  feel  nervous  when  1  get 
on  an  airplane.  There  are  a  lot  of  risks  in  my  life.  When  1  drive  a  car, 
1  feel  unsafe.  But  something  about  prostitution  dates  when  I  didn't 
know  a  guy,  or  one  of  those  first-time  dates,  I  was  alone  in  the  apart- 
ment with  them  so  there  was  a  lot  of  fear.  The  compromise  I  made  was 
to  see  regulars  and  to  see  men  that  1  knew,  but  it  was  in  my  apartment, 
so  1  had  a  little  vulnerability  there.  It  was  unpleasant,  not  necessarily 


because  of  the  danger,  but  because  of  the  compromises  I  had  to  make 
trying  to  avoid  the  danger.  1  always  felt  like  the  next  trick  I  didn't 
know  could  be  the  police,  it  could  be  a  rapist,  so  1  was  better  off  trying 
to  make  sure  that  my  regulars  kept  coming  back.  I  put  so  much  energy 
into  so  many  compromises,  giving  them  a  little  more  time  or  a  little 
more  of  this  or  a  little  more  of  that,  and  negotiating  around  condoms 
was  very  stressful  (at  the  cusp  of  the  AIDS  crisis)  so  it  was  a  constant 
frustration  for  me.  I  was  frustrated  that  I  had  to  take  these  risks  be- 
cause I  couldn't  easily  accrue  other  clients. 

It's  rosy  in  retrospect  because  I  think  that  when  we  look  back 
at  our  lives  anyway  we  kind  of  eliminate  the  worst  parts.  I'm  defi- 
nitely in  touch  with  the  fact  that,  in  retrospect,  it  all  looks  good,  and 
I  remember  the  sweet  times  and  the  gentle  times,  and  the  rituals  with 
flattery  that  we  have  with  clients.  It's  very  interesting.  I  remeinber  the 
times  that  I  was  just  so  proud.  I  was  just  happy  that  1  had  made  some- 
one so  happy.  1  definitely  get  off  on  that.  And  just  the  wisdom  that  I've 
gotten  from  this,  from  seeing  men  when  they're  at  their  most  vulner- 


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able  and  understanding  the  hypocrisies  that  punish  women  for  being 
involved  in  prostitution.  So  in  retrospect,  I've  gotten  so  much  out  of 
this  work  and  learned  so  much,  and  that's  almost  funny  to  say  because 
there's  sort  of  a  taboo  about  being  too  positive  about  it.  And  in  being 
one  of  the  lucky  ones  —  the  way  it  came  into  my  life,  as  an  artist,  and 
being  able  to  work  with  activists  who  were  becoming  involved  in  the 
prostitutes'  rights  movement  —  it  was  really  very  special. 


from  outside  the  European  Union;  when  prostitution  is  legalized  and 
more  severely  regulated,  migrants  from  Latin  Ameiica  and  Southeast 
■Asia,  are  left  out  in  the  cold.  So  there's  kind  of  a  rift  between  migrant 
and  native  sex  workers.  And  the  reality  is  that  only  two  percent  of  peo- 
ple on  the  globe  are  actually  working  outside  their  country  of  origin. 
It  is  a  small  population.  But  in  the  sex  industry  it's  a  larger  population, 
again,  because  it's  part  of  the  informal  economy. 


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Speaking  of  the  movement,  I  wonder  about  the  possibility,  in  the  future, 
of  prostitution  and  all  sex  work  being  normalized,  less  in  the  dark,  less 
dangerous,  and  more  out  in  the  open.  I  wonder  if  that  would  make  it 
less  appealing  for  so  many  people.  I  wonder,  my.self  how  much  of  the 
appeal  is  about  the  secret  of  if.  the  undeiground  —  because  repres- 
sion really  turns  people  on!  Religious  repression,  legal  repression,  all 
kinds  of  repression  can  be  exciting.  What  do  you  think' 

Well.  1  think  that  a  lot  is  changing,  in  terms  of  strippers  being  out 
and  people  working  at  Hooters,  and  there  arc  so  many  young  college 
women  stripping,  so  I  think  nomialization  has  happened  to  a  large 
extent.  Sex  workers  are  coming  out  and  in  some  ways  are  more  inte- 
grated in  the  community.  But  still  it's  funny  how  in  the  closet  some 
young  women  who  strip  are.  Some  people  really  are  still  in  the  closet, 
but  it's  out  a  lot  more  than  it  was.  It  may  be  integrated  in  some  other 
way  into  their  lives  instead  of  having  such  separate  lives,  instead  of 
leading  double  lives.  But  really,  we're  talking  about  a  different  soci- 
ety. If  it  was  so  accepted  that  it  wouldn't  be  shameful,  then  it  would 
be  a  totally  diflfercnt  culture  than  ours  where  sex  is  a  source  of  shame. 
And  it's  about  sexual  fantasies.  1  mean,  that's  like  the  realm  of  science 
fiction  I  think! 

Can  you  talk  about  some  of  the  connections  between  globalization,  or 
global  capitalism,  and  sex  workers  rights? 

Well,  you  know,  capital  can  move  freely  across  borders  but  people 
can't.  So  that  means  that  there  are  more  people  working  in  the  infor- 
mal labor  sector,  and  of  course  prostitution  is  a  big  part  of  that  sector. 
Countries  all  over  Europe  now  report  that  the  immigrant  population 
has  doubled,  tripled,  even  quadrupled  in  some  countries!  This  has  se- 
riously aflected  sex  workers.  And  also,  this  disturbs  the  balance  there 
was  in  these  communities  before  immigration.  There  are  sex  workers 
from  these  cities  who  are  antagonistic  towards  the  migrant  workers, 
and  a  lot  of  the  response  from  European  countries  is,  again,  to  regu- 
late more.  Sometimes  legalize  and  sometimes  create  regulations  to 
guarantee  more  rights,  but  only  for  the  legal  workers.  If  you're  in  the 
European  Union,  you  actually  have  the  right  to  work  as  a  prostitute  in 
other  countries  in  the  Union.  I'm  not  quite  sure  if  that's  true  in  every 
single  country,  but  it  is  for  some.  There  was  a  recent  decision  in  the 
Netherlands  about  the  right  to  work  as  a  prostitute  if  you  come  from 
a  European  Union  country.  But  there  arc  huge  populations  of  people 


And  because  we  can  assume  that  there  are  no  statistics  to  reflect  mi- 
grant sex  workers. 

One  of  the  problematic  parts  of  this  regulation  system  is  that,  in  Hol- 
land although  there  are  some  very  adv anced  law s  guaranteeing  health 
benefits  for  sex  workers,  bringing  the  business  above  ground,  and  en- 
suring workers  rights,  the  flip  side  is  that  prostitution  is  the  only  busi- 
ness where  you  actually  have  to  carry  ID  with  you  to  prove  who  you 
are.  They're  so  afraid  of  protecting  people  from  the  immigrants  and  .so 
many  people  want  to  close  the  borders.  They're  scared  to  death  about 
the  changes  that  are  happening. 

This  is  interesting  because  of  the  whole  visa  thing.  I  know  thai  people 
can  apply  for  work  visas  with  mainstream  jobs.  Is  there  any  kind  of 
work  visa  in  countries  where  prostitution  is  legal? 

That's  what  I'm  saying.  You're  not  afforded  a  work  visa  unless 
you're  coming  from  a  specific  European  Union  country,  for  ex- 
ample. You  can't  apply  for  a  work  visa  to  work  as  a  sex  worker  if 
you're  coming,  say,  from  Thailand.  But,  there  are  other  rubincs; 
people  apply  for  entertainment  licenses,  as  entertainers,  as  dancers, 
and  you  can  get  certain  licensing.  I  know  that  people  are  support- 
ing a  UN  resolution  that  hasn't  yet  been  ratified  by  too  many  coun- 
tries. It's  about  the  protection  of  the  rights  of  immigrant  workers.  It 
basically  sets  up  a  structure  so  that  migrant  workers  are  guaranteed 
their  rights,  and  some  want  sex  workers  to  be  guaranteed  rights 
under  that  too,  but  nobody's  ratified  it. 

IVho  wants  that  inclusion.' 

The  sex  workers'  rights  advocates,  migrant  advocates.  .\t  this  point 
there's  a  huge  movement  of  organizations  working  for  the  rights  of 
migrant  women  workers. 

So  that  could  he  one  of  the  places  where  the  anti-globalization  move- 
ment is  intersecting  with  the  sex  workers  movement.  Because  people 
who  are  out  to  ensure  the  human  rights  of  sweatshop  workers  are  also 
working  for  this  UN  treaty;  right? 

There's  a  lot  of  collaboration  in  temis  of  supporting  it.  But  it's  ver\ 
far  off.  This  is  a  big  pie  in  the  sky,  just  because  it's  one  of  the  least 
ratified  proposals.  Also,  Anti-Slavery  International  is  an  organization 
that  basically  addresses  issues  of  slavery  and  exploitation  in  various 
work  contexts,  and  thev  "vc  been  brave  enough  to  address  issues  for 
sex  workers,  so  there's  some  crossover  in  that  context.  But  quite  of- 
ten, people  organizing  against  globalization  may  draw  the  line  when 
it  conies  to  sex  work,  and  are  hesitant  to  advocate  for  sex  work  as 
w»irk  Ihcv "re  hesitant  sometimes  to  define  it  as  work  and  to  promote 
unioni/alion  and  workers'  rights. 

I'm  coming  fnmt  an  anti-globalization  community  that  really  doesn't 
addfvss  sex  work  (m  the  global  scale  To  me.  and  probably  to  you,  it's 
really  obvious  that  i'S  imperialism  and  globalization,  the  way  that 
the  global  economy  is  changing,  n'ally  affects  women:  it  affects  .tex 
workers  and  populations  of  people  who  would  do  sex  work.  There  are 
a  lot  of  changes  going  on  right  now.  How  can  we  bring  these  mow- 
nients  together? 


photo  t)y  laynr  Wmklebicfc 


I  think  there's  that  simple  idea,  that  capital  can  move  but  workers 
can't.  Why  is  it  that  a  white  man  from  America  can  go  to  any  country 
he  wants,  but  if  you're  a  young  woman  from  Thailand,  you  can't  go 
anywhere  and  you  can't  get  a  visa?  Basically  these  are  laws  that  pro- 
hibit women  in  general  from  traveling  just  on  the  suspicion  that  they 
might  be  prostitutes,  because  they're  at  the  age  of  being  prostitutes.  So 
laws  that  affect  women  and  migration,  laws  that  prevent  women  from 
getting  visas,  are  laws  that  are  directly  related  to  prostitution.  That  ef- 
fects all  women's  migration  in  general. 

It's  interesting  that  you  bring  up  the  ways  that  non-prostitute  and  non- 
sex  worker  women  can  also  be  hurt  by  laws  that  criminalize  sex  work- 
ers. Do  you  have  more  examples  of  that? 

That's  the  one  I'm  most  familiar  with.  There's  also  a  movement  that  is 
anti-globalization  which  sees  all  migration  for  prostitution  as  traffick- 
ing and  slavery  and  doesn't  believe  there  are  any  issues  in  terms  of  la- 
bor rights.  They  see  prostitution  across  borders  always  as  slavery,  and 
so  they're  asking  countries  to  further  criminalize.  This  is  problematic 
especially  because  it  means  that  police  arc  conducting  surveillance 
activities  around  prostitution  businesses,  ostensibly  for  the  reason  that 
they  want  to  find  immigrants.  But  the  reality  is  that  the  industry  is 
criminalized  anyway,  so  that  the  women  they're  dealing  with  are  now 
criminals  and  particularly  vulnerable.  The  way  that  the  approaches  to 
globalization  have  affected  prostitution  have  been  very,  very  hard  on 
the  prostitutes. 

There  was  recently  legislation,  a  bill  by  Senator  Paul  Wellstone 
that  prescribed  penalties  and  redress  for  victims  of  trafficking  and 
forced  prostitution.  But  somehow,  in  that  bill,  they  managed  to  stig- 
matize prostitution  in  general,  and  encouraged  certain  expenditures 
by  the  police  and  the  department  of  justice  that  would,  again,  place 
the  police  in  the  position  of  overseeing  businesses  where  immigrant 
prostitutes  often  work.  That  kind  of  surveillance  has  been  bad  for 
the  communities  and  the  anti-prostitution  feminist  perspectives  have 
been  encouraging  these  sorts  "interventions:"  when  the  police  are 
given  huge  budgets  to  go  into  the  massage  parlors  and  make  sure  that 
there's  no  prostitution.  It's  quite  a  conflict  and  very  problematic  for 
immigrant  women. 

Of  course,  the  US  exports  the  legislation;  we  export  the  priori- 
ties; we  tell  other  countries  that  unless  you  go  along  with  our  emphasis 
against  trafficking  and  prostitution,  we're  not  going  to  give  you  any 
money.  We  pressure  countries  around  the  world  to  adopt  our  stand  on 
prostitution  and  we  export  the  increased  criminalization.  There's  been 
a  huge  movement  amongst  women  for  years  trying  to  influence  the 
agenda  at  the  UN  to  define  all  prostitution  as  a  violation  of  women's 
rights,  and  basically  encouraging  all  countries  to  criminalize  aspects 
of  the  business  like  clients  and  services  as  opposed  to  the  prostitutes 
themselves.  So  criminalization  is  escalating  and  this  is  attached  to  a 
movement  that  is  concerned  about  the  effects  of  globalization. 

/  think  that  people  in  the  anti-capitalist  movement  right  now  have 
a  limited  view  of  what  the  effects  of  globalization  are.  It  s  seen  as 
sweatshops  moving  to  other  countries.  US  corporations  going  to  other 
countries  and  lowering  the  economy  there  so  much  that  women  are 
economically  forced  to  do  work  like  sex  work.  It  s  either  sex  or  sweat- 
shops, which  there  is  some  truth  to! 

I  would  go  along  with  that  analysis.  The  problem  is  that  people  think 
that  the  new  economy  is  leading  to  more  forced  prostitution  and  that 
most  of  the  prostitution  you  see  is  forced,  not  just  by  economic  co- 
ercion, but  by  kidnapping  and  other  kinds  of  force.  This  is  the  por- 
trait of  the  prostitution  phenomenon  in  regard  to  globalization,  as  op- 
posed to  recognizing  that  globalization  has  created  many  migrant  sex 
workers  who  arc  especially  deprived  of  their  rights.  For  example,  in 
many  countries  you  can't  enter  as  a  refugee  or  an  immigrant  if  you've 


worked  for  the  past  several  years  as  a  prostitute,  even  if  you  worked 
legally.  If  you're  a  young  woman,  you  can't  migrate  because  you're 
suspected  of  being  a  prostitute  and  if  you  are  a  prostitute,  you  basi- 
cally have  to  say  that  you  were  forced  in  order  to  get  by  the  police.  So 
that  also  makes  the  issue  confiasing  in  terms  of  how  much  force  there 
is,  and  what's  really  going  on  in  the  industry.  People  are  forced  to  say 
they're  forced  in  order  to  be  redeemed  or  excused  in  any  way! 

And  then  you  have  statistics  that  don 't  add  up. 

The  statistics  don't  reflect  the  realities.  Huge  numbers  of  women 
certainly  are  in  most  abusive  conditions.  But  it  ranges  from  traffick- 
ing arrangements  that  are  exploitative  to  actual  slavery  —  there's  a 
big  range.  And  I  don't  know  any  other  way  to  migrate  to  a  country; 
you  have  to  depend  on  traffickers,  you  can't  get  a  working  visa,  so 
there's  no  other  way.  So  the  progressive  arm  of  the  movement  has 
come  up  with  a  new  definition  of  trafficking:  they're  saying  traffick- 
ing means  forced  labor. 

The  original  criminalization  of  prostitution  was  born  out  of  the 
white  slavery  scare.  That  contributed  vastly  to  the  anti-prostitution 
fervor!  In  retrospect,  I  think  it's  been  shown  that  some  of  the  statis- 
tics around  white  slavery  were  not  at  all  correct  and  that  everyone 
would  have  had  to  be  a  slave  for  them  to  be  true.  And  now  we  see 
somewhat  of  a  rebirth  of  that.  It's  focused  only  on  the  forced  aspect 
—  stereotyping  all  prostitution  as  slavery,  only  talking  about  traf- 
ficking, and  not  talking  about  sex  work  migration.  So  we  talk  about 
all  of  it:  forced  prostitution,  services  for  victims,  and  also  the  rights 
of  migrant  sex  workers.  "A" 

Mary  Christmas  is  an  editor  at  Spread  Magazine,  the  only  magazine 
in  the  U.S.  by.  for,  and  about  sex  industry  workers.  Her  short  video 
Cheer  Up!,  a  documentaiy  about  radical  cheerleaders  co-produced 
with  Jen  Nedbalsky,  is  currently  louring  film  festivals  internationally. 
Check  www.nycradicalcheerleaders.org  for  a  screening  near  you,  or 
contact  her  at  mary@spreadmagazine.org. 


o 

o 


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chuck  d 


interview  Mark  Dowding 
photos  John  Nikolai 
originally  p 
Clamor#17.Nov/Dec2002 


It's  easy  to  argue  that  Public  Enemy  changed  the  face  of  hip-hop  forever.  Taking  their  cue  from  the  conscious  street 
rhymes  of  groups  like  The  Last  Poets,  PE  and  The  Bomb  Squad  crafted  albums  that  were  simply  the  best  in  hip-hop 
and  among  the  best  in  any  genre.  Flavor  Flav's  comic  antics  offset  Chuck's  politics,  creating  records  that  made  people 
dance  as  well  as  think.  Terminator  X's  sampling  and  tumtablist  skills  made  everything  sound  like  an  air  raid  siren; 
immediate,  hectic,  menacing.  They  appealed  to  hip-hop  heads  and  skate  punks  alike.  They  sampled  Slayer,  effectively 
created  rap-rock  with  Anthrax  (Run  DMC's  and  The  Beastie  Boys'  contributions  notwithstanding)  and  made  millions 
of  parents  nerv  ous  about  their  children's  growing  awareness  of  racial  politics  in  America  at  the  end  of  the  millennium. 
In  short.  Public  Enemy  is  not  only  a  rap  band,  they  are  a  rock  and  roll  band  in  every  way  that  matters.  In  recent  years, 
the  band  has  expanded  to  online  radio  stations,  labels,  and  web  sites  (www.btn.com,  www.slamjamz.com,  www.rap- 
station.com,  and  www.publicenemy.com),  in  addition  to  various  side  projects.  Clamor  recently  caught  up  with  Chuck 
D  to  discuss  Public  Enemy's  new  record,  Revolverlution,  as  well  as  other  events  in  the  PE  world. 


Public  Enemy  is  renowned  for  albums  which  have  a  concept.  Is  "Re- 
volverlution "  mostly  a  format  and  packaging  concept  or  is  there  a  musi- 
cal/lyrical concept  too? 

Since  2000,  I  no  longer  believe  in  the  purpose  of  albums,  at  least 
those  consisting  of  12  or  more  new  tracks.  This  belief  is  based  on  the 
amount  of  available  product  in  the  marketplace,  the  music  industry 
basically  promoting  one  song  off  an  album  at  a  very  high  promo- 
tional and  marketing  cost,  and  the  fact  that  more  and  more  people 
have  the  ability  to  assemble  and  compile  their  own  albums  off  the 
Net.  Since  PE  has  a  worldwide  fan  base,  I've  complied  to  this  offline 
option  by  instituting  "a  trilogy  within  a  trilogy"  -  three  blends  of 
music  at  once.  New  tracks,  live  takes,  and  remixes  of  classic  cuts  by 
producers  across  the  earth  via  the  Web  will  institute  a  new  way  that 
rap  artists  with  10  years'  experience  can  still  be  a  part  of  the  current 
field  without  this  unnecessary  pop  pressure,  so  the  format  of  the  re- 
cord might  be  more  revolutionary  than  the  music  itself. 


What  can  we  expect  from  Revolverlution  with  regard  to  the  production? 

Perhaps  the  different  feel  on  this  record  reflects  the  diversity  that's  over- 
looked when  it  comes  to  this  genre.  So  many  genres  like  techno,  trip, 
daim  and  bass,  spoken  word  have  been  triggered  by  hip-hop,  thus  it's 
reflected  in  the  works  of  the  producers  at  hand.  The  selection  is  always 
experimental.  Whereas  today's  producers  try  to  aim  for  what  they  think 
is  a  hit  sound,  I  try  to  encourage  them  to  do  as  they  feel.  This  is  different 
from  the  overdone  go-for-hot  approach.  All  the  studios  involved  brought 
something  to  the  sonic  table. 

DJ  Johnny  Juice  is  working  on  a  track  for  the  album.  For  those  who 
don  't  know,  break  down  the  role  Juice  has  played  in  past  PE  projects. 

Juice  is  such  a  scholar  of  the  music  from  all  aspects.  From  the  very 
beginning,  he  was  a  part  of  the  original  PE  Bomb  Squad  sound  as  a 
tumtablist.  On  "Rightstarter"  on  "Yo!  Bum  Rush  the  Show,"   his  cuts. 


o 
o 


using  a  recorded  bass  kick,  are  the  whole  backing  track  of  the  song.  He 
provided  much  ofthe  rhythm  scratching  on  "Yo"  and  "Millions,"  all  this 
as  a  teenager.  After  that  he  went  west  to  the  Navy,  but  over  the  years 
he's  gained  a  production  philosophy  that  helps  him  today.  I  think  his  ap- 
proach can  help  many  of  these  artists  today,  whereas  I  don't  understand 
how  these  companies  choose  the  same  producers  time  and  time  again 
w  ith  less  than  ground  breaking  results. 

You  have  4  remixes  by  coinpeliliun  winners  on  ihe  new  album.  Whdt  was 
it  about  them  that  led  to  the  final  selections? 

Each  submission  was  judged  by  a  then- virtual  staff  of  about  15  heads  who 
would  take  the  462  submitted  mixes  and  evaluate  them.  They  were  judged 
by  however  that  producer  could  make  the  new  mix  different  from  the  origi- 
nal but  close  to  some  semblance  to  the  hip-hop  genre.  It  was  very  difficult 
becau.se  there  were  so  many  incredible,  diverse  examples,  but  the  virtual 
staff    which,  by  the  way,  is  the  first  of  its  kind  -  ha.s  made  us  confident. 

/  read  a  review  recently  ofthe  new  Cypress  Hill  album  "Stoned  Raid- 
ers "  and  it  was  more  concerned  with  their  age.  saying  they  were  too  old 
to  still  be  doing  albums. 

1  think  there's  unfair  bias  when  it  comes  to  rap  artists  on  the  longevity 
tip.  It  could  be  racial  as  black  folk  are  taught  to  dis-acknowledgc  his- 
tory, future,  and  give  it  a  right-here-right-now  mentality,  but  as  an  artist 
you  have  little  choice  but  to  try  different  approaches.  Whoever  said  that 
about  Cypress  just  doesn't  get  it,  by  limiting  them  to  having  to  satisfy  an 
infantile  limited  circumstance  by  pop  standards.  This  narrowed  view  will 
never  grow  artistry  to  the  respect  level  of  Bob  Dylan.  Beatles.  Stones, 
Miles,  Cash.  Franklin,  etc.  With  PE,  the  problem  is  one  where  PE  just 
adds  to  catalogue  and  presents  something  new,  memorable  and  memora- 
bly new  as  in  the  remixes.  As  with  the  Stones,  show-wise  the  songs  from 
the  past  are  the  into  to  some  new  ones.  To  compete  with  today's  current 
crop  is  definitely  not  the  idea  ...  we  have  two  different  goals. 

For  a  group  that  has  continuously  stressed  the  importance  of  the  DJ, 
don  't  you  find  it  ironic  that  you  have  an  MPS  label  -  a  format  which 
might  eventually  make  it  final  for  the  vinyl? 

I've  always  said  technology  giveth  and  taketh  away.  These  CD  turn- 
tables such  as  the  Pioneer  DJIOOO  are  basically  the  same  technique  and 
this  will  be  the  same  w  ith  MP3s.  The  DJ  can  still  orchestrate  all  this.  I'm 
not  a  loyalist  to  equipment  and  props;  the  4  elements  can  still  be  upheld 
yet  upgraded  and  music,  objective,  visuals,  and  entertainment  quality 
can  still  be  maintained. 


now  able  to  record,  mix.  and  distribute  out  of  their  own  homes  withi)ui 
mass  loot  or  the  middleman  insoKed  on  them  shining. 

You  have  .said  .several  times  you  always  wanted  to  be  the  man  behind  the 
scenes,  do  you  think  that  is  finally  happening  for  you?  Or  can  it  never 
really  happen  because  of  who  you  are? 

It's  a  little  difficult  because  structures  are  built  today  w  ith  a  gang  of  cor- 
porate money,  something  that  has  been  kept  away  from  me  for  various 
reasons.  However,  at  heart,  I  am  a  behind  the  scenes  head  and  there's 
not  tw  o  of  me  and  often  I  hav  e  to  be  a  front  person  to  attract  business. 
Sometimes  I  w  ish  for  three  of  me  or  at  least  500  days  in  a  year.  For  ex- 
ample it  took  a  whole  day  to  do  this  interview  but  for  you  it's  a  pleasure 
and  I'm  thankful. 

Do  you  think  that  there  is  still  the  potential  in  hip-hop  for  change:  i.e.. 
the  sound,  content,  etc..  in  the  way  PE.  Wu-Tang.  Rakim.  Run  DMC.  and 
even  Hammer  changed  it?  Or  has  it  run  its  course? 

Change  is  always  inevitable  ...  the  biggest  change  in  music  in  the  past 
three  years  however  is  not  what  but  how  they  get  it.  It  was  totally  unex- 
pected. Inside  the  music  it's  harder  to  maximize  musical  change  because 
ofthe  vast  amounts  of  hip-hop  artists,  whereas  10  years  and  further  ago, 
there  were  only  a  handful  of  groups  out.  period,  so  change  was  recog- 
nized early  in  the  rap  game. 

In  your  book,  you  made  comments  that  the  aim  for  rap  should  be  to  get  as 
big  as  U2  and  rock  with  regards  to  the  level  of  organization  and  stnature. 
Do  you  think  that  it  is  theivyet  or  is  there  still  a  long  way  to  go? 

Yes  we  have  miles  to  go,  for  every  record  company  staffing  there  should 

be  a  management  component  that  preserves  yet  builds  upon  the  art. 

Do  you  think  the  way  hip-hop  is  represented  by  the  media  is  a  ve/y  lim- 
ited view?  They  seem  determined  to  define  what  it  is  and  what  we  should 
and  shouldn  't  like  and  listen  to. 

Yes.  acceptance  can  be  stifling.  In  the  past,  the  media  considered  all  rap 
as  bad.  Now  it  selects  a  certain  stereotype  and  therefore  puts  a  stamp  on 
it.  This  definition  blurs  the  overall  perception. 

Y(Hi  have  worked  with  the  best  .\fCs  and  pnulucers  in  the  game  and  you 
have  worked  with  people  yet  to  make  a  name  for  themselves  in  rap.  Do 
you  see  it  as  an  even  playing  field  as  far  as  the  excitement  and  challenge 

of  working  with  each  goes? 


It  seems  that  hip-hop  is  fanatical  about  artists  remaining  constant  to  a 
message  or  to  statements  made  on  wax  (take  the  last  question  as  example 
I).  The  term  contradictory  is  often  leveled  at  artists  who  gmw  within  their 
music  and  change  their  viewpoint  (KRS  being  the  prime  example).  Why  do 
y(Hi  think  it  is  that  rap  fans/media  can  if  accept  that  change? 

As  long  the  media  outlets  continue  to  make  it  commercially  impul- 
sive and  infantile,  its  older  fans  will  drop  off  at  a  certain  age  and  make 
younger  ones  ignorant  to  its  roots.  Any  company  would  lo\e  to  continue 
selling  the  same  product  but  having  a  new  audience  accepting  it  as  the 
new  thing  under  the  sun.  Thus,  change  is  not  accepted  and  growth  is  not 
focused  upon. 

I/,  When  you  set  up  www.publicenemv.com  did  you  even  imagine  the 
o  amount  of  talent  that  would  gravitate  to  the  enemy  board?  How  does  it 
=     feel  to  .see  how  it  has  developed' 

g  I  knew  that  if  we  can  build  a  giant  communication  connection,  I  figured 
o  that  the  next  discovery  would  he  the  talent  across  the  planet  who  are 
IM 


If  this  was  sports.  I  would  be  a  coach  even  cats  I  coached  like  Johnny 
Juice  would  be  coaches  now  but  this  is  not  exactly  sports,  so  therefore 
these  qualities  are  not  noticed,  but  there's  no  better  joy  than  in  mentor- 
ing and  giving  someone  advice  on  the  rap  game  and  hip-hop.  Excite- 
ment in  seeing  cats  get  into  the  game  at  ground  level  is  rewarding  where 
before  I  couldn't  ofTer  that  platform.  Understanding  of  this  business  is 
far  and  few.  so  in  our  online  ventures,  these  serv ices  reward  us  when 
peeps  use  them  for  ihemseh  es. 

Since  the  beginning  you  have  been  involved  in  bringing  new  artisis' tal- 
ent to  the  rap  game.  Is  that  .something  you  .see  as  essential  to  the  sun'ival 
of  hip-hop.  or  is  it  moiv  of  a  personal  satisfaction  to  see  if  someone  else 
can  achieve  the  things  PE  did'.' 

Its  impossible  to  bring  back  the  era.  although  cats  can  bring  back  a  cer- 
tain sound,  but  that's  not  enough  so  achiev  ing  the  things  PE  did  is  a  bit 
much.  New  artisis  and  talents  always  stretch  the  art  and  that's  what  I'm 
encouraging.  Slam  is  doing  an  alliance  with  the  newK  retooled  Nap- 
ster Bringthcnoise.com  radio,  hopefully,  will  be  alongside  and  within 


the  XM  satellite  system,  and  Rapstation.com  will  be  powered  further 
with  an  alliance  thru  Artistdirect.com.  Each  of  these  partnerships  should 
bring  a  vast  audience  to  the  circle  of  online  music  services  we  have. 
After  all,  our  philosophy  will  be  based  on  getting  people  music  instead 
of  looking  for  consumers  first  and  pressuring  them  to  buy.  We  would 
like  to  believe  that  if  we  have  an  elaborate  program  that  can  land  a  song 
on  one  million  computer  desktops,  that  will  be  the  introduction  to  an 
artistry  that  they  might  be  loyal  to  and  invest  in.  This  is  the  opposite  of 
companies  today  who  develop  the  song  instead  of  artist  development. 
No  wonder  today  people  would  rather  download  a  song  ... 

There  are  a  number  of  rap's  founding  fathers  beginning  to  make  moves 
again  in  the  industry  (most  recently  Grandmaster  Flash).  What  do  you 
think  has  sparked  this  interest  in  the  roots  of  the  culture?  Do  you  see  a 
point  in  time  where  these  legends  will  finally  see  a  financial  reward  that 
matches  the  ground  breaking  work  that  they  have  done  for  hip-hop? 

We  would  hope  so  but  strangely,  those  who  have  profited  are  the  same 
names  closest  to  the  top  of  the  corporate  circles.  Those  names,  Simmons, 
Cohen,  Combs,  La  Reid,  Harrell,  Rhone,  and  Flex  have  been  granted  po- 
sitions from  the  Clives,  Motollas.  lovines,  Mayses,  as  well  as  the  radio 
corps,  that  have  dictated  how  and  what  music  heads  the  streets.  There's 
so  much  finance  at  the  top  that  how  much  of  it  is  trickling  down  after  the 
lawyers  and  execs  get  theirs  can  be  considered  minuscule.  My  answer  to 
this  one-sidedness  is  my  contribution  in  becoming  a  "Bin  Laden"  to  that 
structure,  in  hoping  to  undermine  the  corporate  dominance  and  circle 
in  record  industry,  radio,  retail,  TV,  and  video  outlets,  it's  my  belief 
that  this  corporate  lock  has  suffocated  the  growth  of  grassroots  business 
through  hip-hop  in  the  hood  from  where  it's  taken  yet  projected  back 
into.  The  fact  that  LA  and  NY  ha\c  these  mega-businesses  suffocating 
all  outside  attempts  that  don't  go  thru  that  circle  can  be  considered  blas- 
phemous; thus,  my  attitude  in  Web-blasting  this  playing  field  flat. 

Looking  back  on  the  last  few  years,  it  seems  to  me  that  you  have  been 
building  foundations  and  tiying  out  ideas  through  your  various  sites 
with  the  final  goal  being  www.slamjamz.com,  for  example,  the  MPS  sec- 
tion of  Rapstation.  How  much  was  part  of  a  plan? 


lectures  and  break  them  down  into  songs.  After  I  wrote  lyrics  for  three 
weeks,  it  was  amazing  to  myself  that  I  recorded  them  all  in  a  one-night 
session,  almost  how  they  did  it  in  the  1950s  and  '60s. 

The  Slamjamz  name  has  been  around  for  a  while.  I  remember  reading 
that  you  wanted  to  develop  artists  in  a  similar  way  Motown  did.  That 
was  when  it  was  a  traditional  label,  now  it  is  online.  It  seems  to  be  the 
case  that  part  ofthefi'eedom  the  artists  have  is  the  right  to  develop  their 
careers  how  they  feel  is  right  and  to  the  level  they  are  happy  in  achiev- 
ing. Is  that  intentional  or  just  an  unavoidable  factor  of  being  online  and 
having  a  roster  of  international  artists? 

1  think  that  those  original  ideas  fit  the  future  of  the  record  industry, 
which  in  this  case  moves  like  the  record  biz  of  30-50  years  ago  where 
recording  and  releases  were  not  far  apart  from  each  other. 

As  well  as  being  business  moves,  are  the  things  you  have  done  on  the 
Web  answers  to  some  of  the  problems  you  have  highlighted  within  your 
lyrics;  i.e.,  you  have  a  problem  with  radio  stations  so  you  set  up  BTN, 
similarly  with  record  labels  and  Slamjamz? 

Yes,  of  course.  I  also  try  to  set  a  prototype  in  the  process. 

I n-house  production  teams  on  labels  like  those  of  No  Limit  and  Bad  Boy 
have  become  the  norm  in  rap.  You  have  gone  more  for  creating  studios 
than  a  set  team  of  producers.  Does  that  allow  for  a  greater  flexibility  of 
who  you  work  with  and  allow  you  to  record  when  ideas  are  still  fresh? 

Yes.  it  does  plus  allows  for  apprentices  in  the  waiting  and  fresh  ideas 
are  best  to  record  immediately  and  released  as  soon  as  possible.  Treat 
the  music  as  you  would  bread,  keep  it  fresh.  When  it  can't  be  released 
quickly  then  you  have  to  add  plenty  of  artificial  preservatives  -  market- 
ing gimmicks,  promotion  -  which  can  be  bad  for  the  overall  health  of 
the  project  at  hand. 

Has  it  ever  got  to  the  point  where  you  felt  like  you  were  banging  your 
head  against  a  wall? 


The  ability  for  anyone  in  the  world  to  upload  to  Rapstation,  and  have  it 
submitted  or  checked  out  by  a  50-pcrson  virtual  A&R  staff  and  possibly 
released  online,  midline  (mail  order  by  demand),  and  offline  is  a  model 
prototype  that  the  majors  should  look  at.  This  is  unprecedented.  When 
Remixplanet  launches,  almost  any  a  cappclla  will  not  be  safe.  Remixers 
will  converge  and  a  pipeline  will  be  headed  back  into  these  companies, 
possibly  embarrassing  a  remix  they  might  have  spent  SI 00,000  on  to 
some  name  who  lazily  couldn't  compare  to  some  hungry  Hungarian  cat 
who  is  yet  to  be  discovered. 

How  is  the  hook  publishing  project  going?  Are  we  looking  at  another 
online  project  (e-books)  or  offline? 

Offda  Books  is  a  small  on-demand  book  imprint  that  will  center  around 
hip-hop  and  I  do  believe  there  is  a  revolution  in  reading  about  the  music 
that  is  the  heartbeat  of  the  young  world.  Next  is  getting  it  to  the  "head- 
beat"  of  the  young  world  as  well. 

The  whole  idea  of  producing  albums  in  the  traditional  sense  doesn  t  appeal 
to  you  anymore,  yet  you  managed  to  get  in  a  studio  and  do  10  tracks  for  the 
Fine  Arts  Militia  album.  Was  that  a  case  of  FA  M  being  logistically  easier  to 
work  on  or  a  refreshing  change  that  got  the  creative  juices  flowing? 

It  was  a  combination  of  things  that  helped  create  that  project.  Number 
one,  Brian  Hardgroove  made  it  easy  to  do,  giving  me  a  skeleton  to  work 
with.  Number  two,  the  studio  is  next  door  and  three,  since  I  do  40  lectures 
a  year,  it  was  a  concept  w  here  1  w  ould  take  my  subjects  and  titles  of  my 


Quite  often  as  it  goes  with  pioneering  things,  but  nothing  compared  to 
Edison,  Alexander  Bell,  George  Carver,  and  other  real  inventors. 

Have  you  ever  thought  "Bugger  this,  I  have  a  family  to  feed,  I  am  just 
gonna  get  jiggy  with  it  for  a  while  and  make  some  money"?  Or  is  the 
thought  of  wearing  those  shiny  suits  what  prevented  you? 

Quiet  as  it's  kept,  my  background  is  rocking  the  hell  out  of  parties.  It's 
the  music  we've  built  upon,  so  in  a  way  1  do  like  the  rhythms  currently 
in  the  clubs;  however,  the  adult  themes  have  no  place  in  broadcasting  to 
an  under- 18  audience  for  the  sole  purpose  of  company  bottom  line  pad- 
ding consumption.  As  an  adult  for  over  24  years,  I  can  handle  anything 
but  1  wouldn't  suggest  that  thing  for  kids.  In  the  future,  the  idea  is  doing 
a  vast  amount  of  recordings  looking  at  myself  as  Duke  Ellington.  Louis 
Amistrong.  Miles  Davis,  Sly  Stone.  Isaac  Hayes  looked  at  music.  I'm 
gonna  make  a  Mistachuck  club  extended  12"  5  cut  album  called  Chuck 
D  rhymes  5  hip-hop  dance  joints  about  nothing!  Also  on  MP3  on  Slam, 
probably  in  2003.  Also  1  wouldn't  be  opposed  to  wearing  mohair  suits  in 
the  case  of  performing  with  the  Fine  Arts  Militia,  "i^ 


subsc 


www.clam 


M 

o 

o 


3t>ove:  Slic  (lelt)  with  his  son  Etwila  and  Ml 


o 
o 


dead  prez 


interview  Rosa  Clemente 
photo  Emilia  Wiles 

origin^..,  ^ 

Clamor  #19;  Mar/Apr  2003 


Dead  Prcz  blazed  into  hip  hop  in  1998  with  the  politically-charged  single,  "It's  Bigger  Than  Hip  Hop."  Their  Let's 
Get  Free  album  spoke  about  Black  self-determination  in  a  way  no  one  else  was  doing  at  the  time,  in  hip  hop  or  out. 
They  were  signed  to  Loud  Records,  but  got  screwed  when  Loud  closed  its  doors  and  DP's  contract  was  commandeered 
by  Columbia  Records,  a  subsidiary  of  Sony.  Their  planned  studio  album,  Walk  Like  A  Wairior,  was  shelved.  After  many 
delays,  the  studio  album  will  hit  the  streets  on  May  20,  2003. 

In  November,  2002,  despite  the  restrictive  terms  of  their  contract,  an  independent  album.  Turn  Off  The  Radio,  was 
put  out  on  Holla  Black  Records  under  the  name  DPZ. 

If  you  get  the  chance  to  see  DP  perform,  do  it,  because  they  bring  an  amazing  show.  DP  is  made  up 
of  Stic  and  Mutulu  "Ml"  Olugabala,  and  is  part  of  People's  Army,  a  larger  musical  and  political  collec- 
tive. Rosa  Clemente  sat  down  with  Stic  at  his  home  in  Brooklyn  to  break  down  the  message  in  the  music. 


You  guys  have  shirts  thai  say- 
by  that? 


Pimp  The  System.  "  What  do  you  mean 


There's  a  lot  of  movements  that  are  building  for  community  or  self- 
determination,  community  control  over  all  aspects  of  our  lives,  from 
the  land  all  the  way  to  the  education,  etcetera.  But  we're  not  there  yet. 
because  that's  a  campaign  that's  building.  You've  got  to  win  masses 
of  people  to  really  make  it  work.  So  in  the  meantime...  people  are 
forced  to  work  40  hours  a  week,  people  are  forced  to  do  all  kinds  of 
shit,  people  selling  pussy,  people  pimping  pussy,  people  doing  all  kind 
of  shit  to  survive.  So  the  mentality  that  I  see  as  progressive,  that  we  try 
to  put  forth  is,  when  you're  in  these  situations,  understand  these  rela- 
tionships and  that  it's  a  pimp  situation,  and  seek  out  ways  to  sabotage 
that  pimping  relationship.  Seek  out  ways  where  you  can  abuse  —  if 
they  put  you  on  the  register,  you  can  get  some  extra  change  for  your 
family.  If  they  put  you  on  guard  duty,  you  can  let  us  come  get  some 
TVs.  You  got  to  pimp  the  system.  And  that's  the  mentality,  not  just 
in  theory,  but  really  that's  what  we  found  ourselves  doing  to  survive 
because  the  jobs  and  shit  like  that  that  they  give  us  aren't  really  for  us 


to  survive,  it's  for  them  to  survive.  So  in  order  for  us  to  survive,  until 
we  get  full  independence,  and  self-determination,  we  got  to  pimp  their 
shit,  and  milk  it  and  use  it.  If  you  go  to  school,  you  can't  go  to  school 
so  you  can  work  to  brainwash  your  people.  You  got  to  go  to  school  so 
you  can  learn  certain  information,  certain  skills  and  use  it  to  empower 
your  community. 

Do  you  think  the  government  of  the  United  States  is  failing? 

I  think  it  depends  on  what  you  think  their  job  is.  I  think  the  govern- 
ment is  on  point  with  what  they  set  out  to  do  —  set  up  a  capitalist 
organization.  I  think  the  government,  this  system,  fails  black  people, 
it  fails  oppressed  people,  the  brown  people,  the  red  people.  But  I  think 
this  government  works  in  the  interest  of  the  majority  of  white  people. 
I  think  that's  a  failure  to  human  rights;  that's  a  failure  to  social  de- 
velopment. In  the  end,  that's  going  to  cause  and  has  caused  war  and 
conflict  and  all  of  the  daily  shit  we  up  against  as  far  as  poverty,  drug 
abuse,  trumped  up  incarceration,  political  imprisonment.  All  this  shit 
is  caused  by  what  this  system  is  designed  to  do.  And  it's  working. 


o 
o 


U1 


You  put  out  an  album  recently.  Turn  Off  That  Radio,  on  your  own 
label.  Is  that  album  and  releasing  it  that  way  part  of  a  resistance  to 

that  system? 

I  hope  that  it  can  be  helpful.  At  the  bottom  of  all  our  struggles  is  the  need 
for  economics,  so  we  got  to  do  this  music.  I  don't  think  everybody  has 
to  use  their  musical  talent,  or  whatever  talent  to  say  the  same  thing.  I 
think  there  are  people  who've  shown  that  they  can  be  empowered  finan- 
cially or  economically  without  talking  about  black  self  detcmiirration. 
They  can  demonstrate  it,  but  their  rap  might  be  about  shaking  your  ass 
—  you  know.  Shit,  that's  not  the  worst  thing  on  the  planet  to  do.  For  us. 
Turn  OlTThe  Radio  is  a  sentiment  and  it's  really  saying,  they're  trying 
to  program  us  with  what  to  think,  what's  cool,  based  off  this  system. 
And  when  we're  saying  turn  off  the  radio,  it's  cause  it's  reflected  in  the 
music,  in  the  entertainment,  and  that's  a  big  weapon  the  oppressor  uses 
on  us.  Whether  you  do  that  literally  or  not  is  not  really  the  mission.  But 
the  mission  is  that  you  would  recognize  why  somebody  would  say  that, 
and  where  that  sentiment  is  coming  from. 

Dead  Pre:  and  your  crew.  People's  Army,  seems  to  be  able  to  bridge 
the  brothers  and  sisters  in  the  hood  struggling  /or  basic  food  and  shel- 
ter and  the  black  middle  class  and  college  students.  What  makes  you 
able  to  bring  those  communities  together  that  sometimes  because  of 
class  issues  are  divided 


the  sense  that  if  we  can  get  a  firm  understanding  of  how  we  got  in 
this  social  situation,  it  will  unify  people  to  change  it. 

But  I'm  drawn  to  the  hood  for  a  lot  of  reasons:  how  I  was  brought 
up,  the  cnv  ironment  1  was  brought  up  in.  1  didn't  never  go  to  college. 
I  was  kicked  out  of  high  school.  So  I  relate  to  what's  going  on  in  the 
street,  just  from  my  uncles,  brothers,  whoop-de-woo  —  shit  I  was  do- 
ing. I  have  more  experiences  than  I  have  in  a  college  setting,  but  I  also 
have  cultural  experiences.  1  been  exposed  to  Marcus  Garvey.  Malcolm 
X,  being  healthy,  training  in  the  martial  arts,  you  know.  With  Dead 
Prez,  we  want  to  be  something  that  black  people  can  find  as  a  link,  in- 
stead of  another  attack  on  black  people.  We  v\ant  black  people  to  feel 
like.  I'm  being  represented.  When  I  listen  and  whatever  these  guys 
try  and  promote  and  put  out  here,  they're  trying  to  include  everyone's 
concerns  as  best  as  they  can.  as  tw o  motherfuckers.  And  I  want  people 
to  know  that  it's  bigger  than  me  and  M  because,  because  of  our  experi- 
ences, we're  limited.  And  M.  Ml  —  that  nigger  is  from  the  hood  and 
the  nigger  went  to  college,  so  he  has  a  balance.  That's  what  enables 
him  to  relate  and  to  recognize  the  significance  of  that  sector  of  the 
population  and  be  able  to  communicate. 

Dead  Pre:  s  music,  especially  your  rhymes,  is  very  upfront:  it  talks 
about  conflicts  with  your  wife,  it  talks  about  your  drinking,  what 
you  were  doing  as  a  kid.  What  gives  you  the  ability  to  be  so  honest 
and  personal.' 


m 

o 
o 


\0 


Most  of  these  things  are  responses  to  repression.  Some  people's  re- 
sponse to  oppression  is  you  got  to  go  to  school,  you  got  to  get  a 
diploma,  you  got  to  get  a  degree,  that's  going  to  put  you  in  a  better 
position  so  you're  not  at  the  bottom  of  this  shit.  That's  some  peo- 
ple's response,  like  the  bourgeoisie.  Some  people's  response  is  the 
white  man  is  the  fucking  devil  'cause  look  how  he  been  doing  ev- 
erybody on  the  whole  planet;  we  need  our  own  language,  we  need 
our  own  culture.  I  ain't  wearing  no  Calvin  Klein.  I'm  wearing  a 
dashiki.  whoop-de-woo.  I'm  celebrating  Kwanzaa.  fuck  Christmas. 
That's  their  response.  Some  people  in  the  hood  it's  like,  I  ain't  got 
no  options,  the  motherfuckin'  police  dropped  this  dope  over  here, 
I'm  gonna  sell  this  dope.  I'm  a  be  a  thug.  And  these  women  got  all 
the  jobs  and  nigger  ain't  got  no  job.  so  I'm  gonna  be  a  pimp.  That's 
somebody's  response  to  oppression.  So,  with  DPZ,  1  understand 
that  it's  all  related  to  like  Malcolm  says,  to  the  response;  these  are 
different  attempts  to  survive.  So  instead  of  separating  ourself.  it 
seem  like  we  can  pull  each  other  together  by  understanding  that 
that's  all  we  trvinu  to  do.  I  have  a  belief  in  political  education  in 


There  was  a  time  in  hip  hop  w here  I  used  to  write  brag  rhymes,  you 
know :  I'm  the  best  MC  don't  test  me.  whoop-de-woo.  all  that.  And  then 
people  started  saying,  keep  it  real.  That  became  a  popular  phrase.  And 
I  started  saying  yeah.  I  like  that.  I  like  that  real  shit.  I  started  thinking 
about  people.  I  don't  know  if  they  were  keeping  it  real,  but  things  that 
was  real  life  stories  and  occurrences  —  that  shit  made  me  say.  yeah. 
if  I'm  gonna  do  this  shit,  that  answers,  that  fulfills  what  I'm  trving  to 
do.  I  gotta  write  about  the  stress  I'm  going  through.  I'm  inspired  by 
people  like  2Pac.  his  honesty  with  his  mom  on  crack,  whoop-de-woo. 
He  putting  that  out  there,  that  shit  is  therapy  for  him.  and  it  let  other 
people  know  that  it's  not  a  skeleton  in  your  closet,  this  is  life.  The  rul- 
ing class  wanna  make  a  fantasy,  but  we're  dealing  with  conflicts  and 
shit  all  day  and  if  I'm  trying  to  hide  it.  then  I'm  not  Irving  to  fix  it.  If 
I  put  it  out  there.  I  can  probably  get  some  answers  and  move  forward. 
So  it's  a  strength.  I'm  not  saying  in  no  funny  way,  but  it's  a  strength  to 
say  what's  really  poppin'.  Put  it  out  there  so  people  don't  have  no  illu- 
sion. People  think  because  you  talk  about  be  healthv  vou  some  guru  on 
health  nah.  It's  because  I've  been  unhealthy  a  lot  and  1  can  appreci- 
ate being  healthy.  I  don't  want  to  just  start 
talking  about  health.  I  want  to  start  talking 
about  how  unhealthv  I  done  lived,  so  it  can 
relate.  That's  the  whole  thing.  I'm  trving  to 
talk  to  real  people  about  some  real  shit  so  I 
got  to  be  honest  enough  with  myself  so  you 
know  that's  what  I'm  reallv  doing,  "tr 

Rosa  Clemen fe  is  a  Black  Puerto  Rican 
grassmots  organizer,  journalist,  and  en- 
irepivneuK  She  is  currently  a  radio  host 
and  pmduccr  with  WB.-^I  (9Q  >  F.\f  .\TC) 
iUid  with  .4ir  .-imiriia  Radio,  an  oiganizer 
with  the  Malcolm  X  Graisroots  Movement, 
coonlinator  of  the  State  of  the  Black  world 
lorums  and  a  freelance  hip  hop  journalist. 
She  is  on  the  hoards  of  the  Sational  Coali- 
tion to  .Abolish  the  Death  Penalty.  The  Biv- 
cht  Forum,  and  The  Institute  of  the  Black 
World 


BRING  THESE  HLMS  AND  SPEAKERS  TO  YOUR  TOWN 


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tn 

o 
o 


CO 


studs  terkel 


interview  and  photos  Catherine  Komp 

Originaiiy  plniidu  m 

Clamor  #25,  Mar/Apr  2004 


44T  Told  the  fort!  Hold  the  fort!"  That's  the  order  Studs  Terkel  is  shouting  to  the  younger  generation,  telling  them 
JLXto  get  up  and  do  something  to  halt  the  mounting  string  of  assaults  on  this  country.  And  if  anyone  can  make 
that  call,  it's  Studs  Terkel.  Going  on  92  years  old,  still  teeming  with  punch  and  vitality,  Terkel  has  spent  the  better 
part  of  his  lifetime  speaking  out  against  injustices  and  fighting  for  a  better  world.  Part  of  that  world  already  exists, 
sometimes  it's  just  hard  to  see.  Terkel  shines  a  torch  on  this  world,  on  a  past  filled  with  both  trials  and  triumphs,  try- 
ing to  eradicate  what  he  calls  our  national  Alzheimer's  disease.  Just  before  the  end  of  2003,  Studs  Terkel  welcomed 
Catherine  Komp  in  to  his  Chicago  home  to  talk  about  this  past,  and  his  new  book,  Hope  Dies  Last.  The  following  is 
an  excerpt  from  that  talk. 


Why  a  hook  about  hope? 

As  you  know  I've  written  a  lot  things  called  oral  histories.  The  last 
dealt  with  reflections  on  death  called  Will  the  Circle  Be  Unbroken. 
But  it's  not  about  death,  it's  about  life.  See  death  doesn't  mean  a  thing 
unless  there's  something  to  be  celebrated,  the  life.  So  basically  it's 
about  people  who  discuss  it  and  how  their  lives  came  in  to  being,  the 
events  in  their  lives,  the  despair  and  the  hope  that  came.  It  does  have 
a  point  of  view,  very  definitely.  All  of  the  books  do.  Finally  we  come 
to  a  certain  time  in  our  history.  I'm  always  trying  to  hit  a  certain  mo- 
ment, you  know. 

There  is  such  despair  now,  considering  the  Administration.  With 
Bush,  the  nature  of  him,  Cheney,  Rumsfeld,  of  preemptive  strikes, 
of  utter  disdain  for  the  intelligence  of  people.  So  I  feel  there's  been 
an  assault  far  more  serious  than  September  1 1 .  September  1 1  was  a 
wake-up  call.  We  are  part  of  the  world.  Do  you  realize  that  during 
World  War  II  we  were  the  only  major  participant  who  was  neither 
bombed  nor  invaded?  Every  member  of  the  allies,  every  member 
of  the  axis  powers,  one  way  or  another.  So  war  to  us  happens  else- 
where, when  we  talk  of  war  it's  always  been  elsewhere.  And  one 
of  the  people  in  this  book  Hope  Dies  Last,  appeared  in  a  previous 
book.  Admiral  Gene  LaRoque,  he's  one  of  the  heroes  of  World  War 


II,  young  commander  of  a  ship.  He  also  founded  the  Center  for  De- 
fense Information  that  monitors  the  Pentagon.  He  says  the  United 
States,  since  the  Cold  War  began,  since  the  end  of  World  War  II,  has 
engaged  in  more  military  adventures  overseas  than  any  empire  in  the 
history  of  the  human  species.  He  starts  naming  them,  Guatemala, 
Panama,  Granada!  We  never  even  heard  of  Granada  until  President 
Ronnie  Reagan  says  it  was  a  danger  to  us.  We  thought  Granada  was 
a  place  in  Spain  or  a  little  variation  of  a  folk  song  heard  in  supermar- 
kets on  the  muzak.  But  no,  it's  our  enemy.  Finally  it's  come  to  the 
time,  such  disdain  and  contempt  for  the  intelligence  of  the  American 
people.  So,  hope  dies  last,  a  lot  of  people  lost  hope. 

And  so,  now  I'm  addressing  the  young  people  and  why  I  want  to 
be  in  the  Clamor  magazine,  that  I  know  has  young  readers.  In  1932, 
now  I'm  91  going  to  be  92,  I  was  unable  to  vote  for  Franklin  Delano 
Roosevelt,  or  it  might  have  been  the  socialists  or  the  communists  for 
that  matter  (I  would  have  voted  for  Roosevelt).  But  I  was  20  years  old. 
I  was  underage,  because  2 1  was  the  minimum  age.  And  then  when  the 
voting  age  became  18,  I  said  there's  hope,  my  god  it's  fantastic!  And 
then  I  learned  to  discover  that  only  16  percent  of  young  people  voted 
in  the  last  election.  Sixteen,  that's  one-six,  percent  voted  which  of 
course  was  Bush's  in.  So,  I  want  to  say  this  as  a  preface,  I  want  to  say 
to  young  people  who  say  "I'm  not  going  to  vote,  it  doesn't  matter," 


o 
o 


>0 


IT) 

o 
o 


O 


you  are  voting!  When  you  stay  home  and  don't  vote,  you  are  voting 
for  Bush.  Bush  hopes  for  you  to  say,  I  will  not  vote.  That's  a  vote 
for  him.  And  that's  why  he  won,  because  you  didn't  vote.  So,  this 
is  your  time.  And  you've  got  to  vote.  The  reason  they  didn't  vote 
is  because  of  hopelessness,  call  it  cynicism.  And  these  are  the  two 
enemies  we  face. 

What  about  apathy? 

And  apathy  of  course  goes  along  with  it,  call  it  the  unholy  trinity. 
Apathy,  hopelessness,  and  cynicism  and  that's  all  Bush  needs  and 
that's  the  point.  And  so,  1  got  the  idea  for  the  book  about  25  years 
ago,  from  a  person  I  interviewed.  Jessie  de  la  Cruz  is  her  name.  And 
she's  a  farm  worker  who  helped  Cesar  Chavez  organize  the  Farm 
Workers  of  America.  She  said,  "In  times  that  are  bleak,  bad  times, 
bewildering  times,  we  have  a  saying  in  Spanish.  La  csperanza  muere 
ultima.  Hope  dies  last."  And  that  phrase  stuck  with  me.  1  did  several 
books  since  I  met  her,  and  then  it  came,  this  one.  1  had  to  do  it  now. 
it  had  to  be  written. 

/  came  across  this  phrase  in  the  "Younglings"  section  of  the  book, 
from  Bob  Hemauer,  he  say^  "Hope  comes  in  the  struggle.  '  Do  you 
think  people  need  to  be  activists  and  struggling  in  order  to  find  that 
sense  of  hope? 

Well,  nothing  comes  over  night,  nothing  is  magic,  it's  work  of  course. 
The  very  fact  that  you  are  going  out  knocking  on  doors,  that  you  write 
a  letter  to  the  editor,  that  you  take  part  in  a  rally  whether  it  be  for 
environmental  safety  or  for  peace  or  for  civil  rights  or  liberties,  the 
fact  that  you  do  it,  means  you  count.  People  feel  that  they  don't  count, 
that's  an  old  time  word.  You  count!  When  you  take  part  in  something, 
and  you  partner  with  other  people,  even  though  the  great  many  seem 
against,  you  suddenly  realize  you  were  doing  something,  even  if  that 
battle  or  moment  may  fail,  you  made  an  inroad!  There's  an  old  black 
spiritual.  We're  climbing  Jacob's  latter,  rung  by  rung,  we're  climbing 
higher  and  higher,  every  rung  .  . .  But  now  and  then  you  slip  back,  and 
we're  in  a  slipped-back  period.  We've  slipped  a  couple  of  rungs,  so 
now  it's  two  rungs  upward  and  one  rung  back,  three  rungs  up  and  two 
rungs  back.  It's  a  long  haul,  but  that  battle  itself  will  also  give  other 
people  hope.  These  people  in  this  book  that  I  celebrate  give  hope  to 
the  rest  of  us,  always  have. 

In  your  experiences  over  the  years,  would  you  say  there 's  less  hope 
right  now? 

Right  now  there's  bewilderment  I'd  say,  there's  cynicism  and  right 
now  I'm  speaking  specifically  of  the  young,  because  that  to  me  is 
the  vote  that  will  most  determine.  You  know  how  embarrassing 
imagining  the  disdain,  cynicism,  and  that's  what  you  have  to  buck 
'cause  that's  easy,  and  it's  cheap  and  worthless.  Emily  Dickinson 
wrote  "Hope  is  a  thing  with  feathers."  And  throughout  you  have  that 
theme.  But  this  isn't  a  pollyanna  book.  I  don't  mean  everything  is 
wonderful  and  sweet  and  sunshine,  I  don't  mean  have  a  nice  day 
stulT.  I'm  talking  about  it's  a  battle,  but  it's  there  though.  That's  how 
the  country  came  to  be  to  begin  with.  And  remember  most  of  .Ameri- 
ca, with  the  colonies  that  were  here,  were  not  for  independence  from 
the  King.  They  didn't  give  a  damn  one  way  or  another.  These  were 
the  agitators,  it  was  Tom  Paine,  it  was  Sam  Adams  you  see.  They 
were  the  minority.  And  the  fight  against  abolition,  the  fight  against 
slavery,  and  then  during  the  '6()s  there  were  students  and  African- 
Americans  fightmg  for  civil  rights  but  also  against  the  Vietnam  War. 
In  the  beginning  it  was  just  the  young,  the  few,  who  were  beaten  up 
by  the  jocks.  And  then  the  jocks  joined  them  later  on.  I  call  them, 
these  people  whose  testimony  you  hear  in  the  book,  the  prophetic 
minority.  Prophetic  is  the  word. 


What  does  this  prophetic  minority  look  like? 

I  want  to  talk  about  the  couple  to  whom  I  dedicated  the  book.  Their 
names  are  Clifford  and  Virginia  Durr,  both  long  since  dead.  They 
were  from  the  South,  Montgomery,  Alabama,  the  cradle  of  confed- 
eracy. A  well-off  white  family,  she  was  the  daughter  of  a  clergy- 
man, not  too  well-off  but  she  might  have  been  a  southern  bell.  Her 
husband,  Clifford  Durr.  was  a  member  of  the  Federal  Communica- 
tions Commission  under  Roosevelt.  And  he's  the  one  who  said  the 
air  belongs  to  the  public  — just  the  opposite  of  the  FCC  today  un- 
der Bush,  with  Powell's  son  as  chairman,  that  says  fewer  and  fewer 
people  can  own  more  and  more  things  without  regulation.  And  so 
there  in  Washington,  during  the  days  of  the  Great  Depression  and 
the  Cold  War  is  coming  into  being,  and  Clifford  Durr  was  asked 
by  Truman  to  sign  a  loyalty  oath.  And  Clifford  Durr  says,  "I  don't 
believe  in  that."  "Oh  not  you,"  Truman  says.  "Just  your  staff."  And 
Clifford  Durr  says  "I  will  not  demean  my  staff!"  And  he  resigned 
and  went  back  to  Montgomery.  Now  here's  Virginia  Durr.  She  was 
in  this  battle  for  civil  rights  for  years.  But  there  were  three  ways 
she  could  have  gone.  I  said  she  could  have  been  a  southern  bell,  as 
in  Gone  With  the  Wind,  be  kind  to  her  "colored  help"  and  joined 
a  garden  club.  Or,  if  she  had  intelligence  and  sensitivity  and  did 
nothing,  she  could  have  gone  crazy  like  her  schoolmate,  Zelda  Fair 
Fitzgerald,  F.  Scott  Fitzgerald's  wife,  who  was  brilliant  and  went 
crazy.  But  she  took  the  third  path.  "Something's  cockeyed  here, 
something's  wrong  here,  and  I'm  going  to  fight!"  So  she  became 
the  rebel  girl  in  that  sense. 

So  they  got  into  all  kinds  of  trouble.  And  one  time  I  remember  her 
best.  I  first  heard  about  her  when  she  came  one  Sunday  afternoon  to 
Orchestra  Hall  in  Chicago  which  seats  3600.  She  and  Dr.  Mary  McLeod 
Bethune,  famous  African-American  educator  who  was  a  close  ftiend  of 
Eleanor  Roosevelt.  They  came  to  speak  out  about  the  poll  tax,  the  poll 
ta.x  vv  as  aimed  at  black  people  and  poor  vv  hites  and  made  it  difficult  for 
them  to  vote.  And  Dr.  Bethune  was  great,  but  Virginia  Durr.  this  v\  hite 
woman  was  fantastic!  So  I  went  back  stage  to  shake  her  hand  and  I 
put  forth  my  hand  she  says,  "Thank  you  dear."  and  she  puts  her  hand 
in  mine  and  in  it  are  100  leaflets.  And  she  says  "Now  dear,"  without 
missing  a  beat,  with  the  Southern  accent  I  like  to  imitate.  "You  hurry 
outside  and  you  stand  near  the  curb  and  pass  out  the  leaflets  because  Dr. 
Bethune  and  I  are  speaking  at  the  Abyssinian  Baptist  Church  in  three 
hours  on  the  South  Side."  So  that's  Virigina  Durr. 

Well,  that's  the  kind  of  people  to  whom  I  dedicate  the  book.  It 
comes  to  a  key  part,  why  1  say  hope  dies  last  and  wh\  Virginia  and 
Clifford  are  a  part  of  a  prophetic  minority,  those  that  follow  them  are 
in  this  book.  It's  because  in  1965,  this  is  years  after  they  had  been 
the  15,  20  people  that  used  to  march  and  get  egged,  tomatoed.  and 
threatened.  In  1965.  two  years  after  the  Martin  Luther  King  march 
in  Washington,  was  the  Selma  Montgomery  march.  The  march  from 
Selma  to  Montgomery,  to  the  mansion  of  Governor  George  Wallace. 
Tvso  hundred  thousand  people  showed  up!  It's  a  fantastic  moment, 
two  hundred  thousand  people  suddcnK  evervvvhere  showed  up!  And 
that  night  at  the  home  of  Clifford  and  Virginia  Durr.  I  know  the  ad- 
dress. Two  Felder  Street,  and  I  knew  it  so  well.  The  home  was  always 
open  to  everybody,  and  these  few  people  who  were  there  in  the  begin- 
ning way  back  were  there.  .'\nd  there  was  Governor  (ieorgc  Wallace 
on  TV.  addressing  the  vsorld  sav ing  "These  damn  communists  came 
here!"  excoriating  some  people,  naming  people  in  that  room,  among 
them  Miles  Horton  of  the  Highlander  Folk  School.  And  Miles  Horton 
made  a  toast  and  said  "Isn't  it  wonderful,  just  a  few  years  ago.  do 
you  remember,  it  was  just  10.12.  15  of  us  marching  down  the  street. 
We  knew  each  other  by  name.  Now  it's  two-hundred  thousand  and  I 
didn't  know  a  single  person  there,  they  didn't  know  me  from  Adam. 
But  wasn't  it  wonderful'.'  Isn't  it  great?"  .'\nd  that's  what  I  mean  by  a 
prophetic  mnn>ntv  and  that's  wh\  the  book  is  dedicated  to  them.  And 
from  then  on  it  becomes  contemporary  people  doing  it. 


Do  you  think  that's  starting  to  happen  now.  after  all  of  the  demonstrations  against  the  war 
on  Iraq? 

Well,  I  think  it's  there  underneath.  But  people  are  afraid  to  speak  out.  Although  more  and 
more  are!  And  letters  to  the  editor.  I  read  all  kinds  of  stuff,  a  little  item,  a  squib,  can  be  of  sig- 
nificance to  me.  And  I  asked  the  Tribune  editor,  (and  that's  a  conservative  paper)  and  he  says 
its  about  50/50,  pro  or  anti-Bush.  Which  is  interesting,  you  find  this  in  the  letters.  But,  in  any 
case,  it's  the  cynicism  you  see,  especially  among  the  young,  1  emphasize  the  young  here.  I 
have  this  hearing  problem  and  make  a  joke  about  it,  with  my  two  hearing  aids  and  the  words 
don't  come  out  clearly.  And  so,  this  is  what  I'm  leading  up  to,  why  the  cards  are  stacked,  the 
dice  is  loaded,  but  despite  that,  there  are  people  like  Virginia  and  Clifford  Durr  today.  Be- 
cause when  Bush  triumphed  . . .  remember  the  attack  on  Iraq,  the  preemptive  strike?  Despite 
the  United  Nations,  to  hell  with  the  United  Nations!  For  three  days  it  looked  like  a  triumph. 
And  we  hear  the  word  "embedded  journalists."  They  were  embedded  and  we  hear  how  great 
this  is.  Well,  to  my  ears  it  comes  out  "In  bed  with  the  journalists!"  You  see,  so  here  we  have 
the  media,  the  establishment  media.  TV,  radio,  cable.  Fox,  newspapers  by  and  large.  So  that's 
why  the  alternative  media  needs  to  come.  The  others  are  controlled  by  a  few.  We  know  that 
an  Australian  neanderthal  named  Rupert  Murdoch  is  one  of  the  most  powerful  media  moguls 
in  the  country.  So,  that's  what  the  battle  is,  the  cards  are  stacked,  the  dice  is  loaded,  but  still 
we  roll  them.  And  somehow  we  still  deal  them  out!  And  1  think  there's  a  hopeful  minority, 
and  I  think  it's  going  to  more  and  more  to  the  majority.  Hopefully,  "ir 

To  read  the  full  interview,  visit  w\iM.clamormagazine.org.  click  on  "issues,  "  and  look  for 
the  feature  in  issue  25. 

Catherine  Komp  is  Clamor'.^  Media  section  editor,  and  a  radio  news  producer  and  re- 
porter based  in  Syracuse,  NY. 


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in 


laura  flanders 


interview  Todd  Steven  Burroughs 


in 


Clamor  #28,  Sep/Oct  2004 


It's  been  easy  to  ignore  Laura  Flanders.  Yes,  she's  been  on  CNN,  Fox  News  Channel  and  "To  The  Contrary,"  a 
national  PBS  chat  show  from  the  wide-ranging  perspectives  of  different  women,  but  only  occasionally.  "I'm  inter- 
viewed once  in  a  blue  moon  to  twice  in  a  blue  moon,"  Flanders  said  of  the  cacophony  of  initials.  She's  a  dying  breed 
—  a  longtime  progressive  radio  host  (Air  America,  "Democracy  Now,"  "CounterSpin")  who  has  actually  earned  the 
right  10  be  on  radio  and  television  by  doing  reporting.  She's  an  interesting  media  personality  —  a  pundit  who  smiles 
like  a  human  being  and  not  a  snarling  tiger.  She's  an  anomaly:  a  strong  person  and  personality  unafraid  of  being  nice, 
and  a  public  debater  who  actually  thinks  before  she  speaks.  Flanders  is  proud  to  be  strongly  to  the  Left  of  the  camera 
in  the  Land  of  The  Talking  Heads. 


Her  colleagues  join  her  in  pride.  "Her  credential  for  being  on  the 
radio  is  not  having  a  lot  of  opinions,"  said  Janine  Jackson,  program 
director  of  Fairness  And  Accuracy  In  Reporting  (FAIR),  a  progres- 
sive media  watchdog  group  based  in  New  York  City.  Flanders  was 
the  founder  of  FAlR's  Women's  Desk,  and  co-hosted  "CounterSpin," 
FAIR'S  nationally  syndicated  weekly  radio  show,  for  several  years, 
at  least  three  of  which  with  current  co-host  Jackson.  Flanders  is  first 
a  journalist  who  earned  her  pundit  stripes  through  reporting,  Jackson 
reminded.  But  Flanders  embraces  analytical  opinion.  "She's  not  go- 
ing to  muzzle  herself  and  muzzle  her  brain,"  said  Nicole  Sawaya, 
Flanders's  boss  at  KALW-FM,  a  public  radio  station  in  San  Francisco. 
KALW's  "Your  Call"  has  been  hosted  by  Flanders  since  2001.  (It's 
now  hosted  on  alternate  days  by  Flanders  and  Farai  Chidfeya,  a  Black 
woman  who  made  waves  a  decade  ago  as  a  20-something  Newsweek 
correspondent,  first-time  author,  and  CNN  pundit.)  But  Flanders,  42, 
has  been  on-air  since  the  mid-1980s,  working  her  way  up  the  Pacifica 
Radio/alternative  radio  circuit. 

Flanders  is  not  a  kook  like  Ann  Coulter,  but  she  takes  punditry 
very  seriously.  "To  me,  it's  not  a  game,  it's  not  a  show."  She  explains 
that  it's  really  about  continuing  a  tradition  of  dissent  —  George  Seldes, 


I.F.  Stone,  Ida  B.  Wells,  et.  al.  But  does  she  ever  pal  around  with  her 
fellow  talking  heads?  "We  get  friendly  with  each  other  a  little  bit  .... 
[but]  I  can't  imagine  going  out  to  dinner  with  any  of  them,  it  wouldn't 
be  a  relaxing  dinner  anyway.  It's  not  like  we're  all  buddies,  anyway." 

And  if  they  were,  it's  not  like  she  has  a  lot  of  time  to  do  that 
sort  of  thing.  From  her  plugged-in  New  York  City  loft,  she  prepares 
for  "The  Laura  Flanders  Show"  —  her  weekend  program  on  Air 
America,  the  embryonic  liberal  news-talk  answer  to  the  Right's  col- 
lective hate-radio  roar  —  and  does  KALW's  "Your  Call"  two  days 
during  the  week.  And  then  there's  writing  for  publications  like  The 
Nation  and  CounterPunch  and  websites  like  workingforchange.com. 
And  then  there's  all  those  meetings.  And  then  there's... well,  a  life. 
"Compare  me  to  [Pacifica  Radio's]  Amy  Goodman  and  I'm  a  loafer," 
she  said,  laughing. 

"I  see  Laura  as  one  of  the  all-too-rare  intellectuals  ...  and  truly 
progressive  voices,"  says  Jackson.  She  can  field  many  perspectives, 
"but  at  the  same  time  she's  not  a  boring  egghead.  I'm  thankful  that  she 
has  the  platform  that  she  does.  1  just  wish  it  was  bigger." 

Flanders  does,  too.  But  in  the  meantime,  she's  learning.  From 
call-in  talk  radio  ("Most  of  the  experts  are  in  the  audience  and  if  you 


o 
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speak  to  them  not  in  the  lowest  common  denominator,  but  the  high- 
est common  denominator,  they  will  respond")  and  from  television's 
power  to  represent  opinions  of  people  not  heard  and  seen  otherwise. 

As  a  rare  progressive  voice  in  the  media  wilderness,  the  London 
native  is  in  for  the  fight  of  her  life,  and  she's  in  good  company.  The 
Left,  she  argued,  is  building  its  own  forums  to  counteract  the  Heritage 
Foundation  and  the  army  of  Right-wing  syndicated  broadcast  and  print 
pundits  who,  in  her  view,  get  their  public  policy  agenda  implemented 
before  the  rest  of  the  country  even  figures  out  what's  happening.  These 
new  forums,  she  said,  include:  The  Progressive  Media  Project:  the  In- 
stitute For  Public  Advocacy,  and  Pacifica  Radio's  "Democracy  Now," 
which,  in  its  eight-year  history  has  become  the  closest  thing  progres- 
sives have  to  a  "60  Minutes." 

And  books.  Bushwomen:  Tales  Of  A  Cynical  Species  is 
Flanders's  second  (and  heavily  footnoted)  book,  with  a  third,  the 
anthology  The  W  Effect:  Sexual  Politics  In  The  Bush  Years  And 
Beyond,  just  arriving  in  bookstores  this  past  June.  The  W  Effect's 
contributors  include  feminist  writing  stars  as  Jill  Nelson,  Vandana 
Shiva  and  Barbara  Ehrenreich. 

But  how  much  does  Flanders'  work  really  matter  in  a  nation 
whose  Establishment  considers  Bill  Clinton  a  progressive  and  George 
W.  Bush  a  moderate?  "I'm  grateful  she's  out  there,"  said  Jackson  of 
Flanders.  "But  1  worry  that  she's  lonely." 

It's  been  easy  to  ignore  Laura  Flanders,  but  Bushwomen  is  mak- 
ing a  mark.  It  is  a  deft  blend  of  well-documented  reporting,  instant 
history  and  media  criticism,  with  just  the  right  dashes  of  humor.  It 
tells  the  story  of  how  the  Bush  administration  redefined  feminism  and 
ci\  il  rights  to  fit  its  own  reactionary  purposes.  The  work  profiles  the 
Right's  top  female  leaders  and  how  they  got  to  power.  Very  familiar 
names  —  Laura  Bush,  Christine  Todd  Whitman,  Condoleeza  Rice, 


in 
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in 


Elaine  Chao,  Lynne  Cheney  and  Karen  Hughes,  among  others  —  get 
a  critical  evaluation,  and  are  found  wanting,  to  say  the  least. 

In  the  Bizzaro  feminism  world  Flanders  has  thoroughly  docu- 
mented, women  in  the  Bush  administration  are  "in\  aluable  to  the  Pres- 
ident, [but]  under-scrutinized  in  the  press."  This  allows  them  to  wreak 
public  policy  havoc  on  environmental  regulations,  pervert  memories 
of  the  Civil  Rights  Movement,  help  steal  Presidential  elections,  and 
just  plain  lie.  Flanders  defines  the  Bushwomen  —  the  females  who 
serve  either  as  cabinet  members  or  sub-cabinet  members  —  as  "an 
extremist  administration's  female  front.  Cast  in  the  public  mind  as 
maverick,  or  moderate,  or  irrelev  ant.  laughable  or  benign,  their  well- 
spun  image  taps  into  convenient  stereotypes,  while  the  reality  remains 
out  of  sight.  If  women  were  taken  more  seriously,  the  Bushwomen  con 
job  wouldn't  stand  a  chance,  but  in  the  contemporarv  United  States,  it 
just  might." 

Included  in  Bushwomen  are  stories  of  Katherine  Harris,  Chris- 
tine Todd  Whitman  and  Gale  Ann  Norton.  Harris  was  the  Florida 
Secretary  of  State  who  was  so  openly  partisan  that  Republican  Party 
staffers  used  her  offices  and  its  computers  during  the  2000  Presi- 
dential election  recount.  She's  the  one  that  got  thousands  of  Blacks 
purged  from  the  voting  rolls  in  Florida.  (Remember:  Bush  "won" 
that  state  in  2000  by  just  537  votes.)  Todd  Whitman  was  the  Envi- 
ronmental Protection  Agency  head  who  had  declared  Ground  Zero 
fit  for  breathing  (and  profit)  less  than  one  s\eek  after  9-11.  Secretary 
of  the  Interior  Norton  never  met  a  corporation  she  didn't  like  —  and, 
seemingly,  didn't  help  secure  mineral-rich  land  without  worrying 
about  pesky  things  like  clean  air. 

Flanders's  own  profession  does  not  escape  her  author's  stem 
gaze.  The  nation's  elite  news  media,  particularly  The  Washington 
Post,  have  a  lot  to  apologize  for  in  their  handling  of  these  women. 
argues  Flanders.  The  Post,  she  reminded,  devoted  a  whole 
article  on  Katherine  Harris"  makeup  (albeit  done  by  the 
newspaper's  fashion  reporter).  And.  she  adds,  the  fight  on 
the  Bush-era  Civil  Rights  Commission  between  conserva- 
tive Abigail  Themstrom  and  liberal  Mary  Frances  Berry  was 
described  by  The  Post  as  a  'catfight"  instead  of  a  serious 
dispute  over  alleged  rug-sweeping  over  the  Florida  debacle. 
The  New  York  Times,  in  a  profile  of  Rice,  talked  about  her 
hair  and  clothes  ("She  is  always  impeccably  dressed,  usu- 
ally in  a  classic  suit  with  a  modest  hemline,  comfortable 
pumps  and  conservative  jewelry").  There  have  been  other 
articles  in  The  Post  and  other  elite  media  on  these  person- 
alities and  issues.  But  the  fact  remains  that  these  articles, 
or  their  particular  emphases,  wouldn't  exist  if  their  subjects 
had  peniscs. 

Bushwomen  is  powerful  enough  on  race  to  straighten 
Huey  Freeman's  hair.  It  catalogues  v  irtually  every  move  Bu.sh 
has  made  using  race  and  gender.  It  documents  how.  as  women 
of  color.  Rice  ('"[Slhc  had  the  advantage  of  not  looking  like 
an  oilman ")  and  Chao  would  use  their  personal  histories  as 
media  shields  against  criticism,  subtly  playing  on  the  pater- 
nalism of  the  white  men  who  run  .America's  nearly  all-white 
newsrooms.  (Rice,  a  member  of  Bimiingham's  lighi-skinned 
elite,  remembered  well  the  16"'  Street  Baptist  Church  explo- 
sion in  1%3  that  killed  four  little  Black  girls.  Another  young 
Black  girl  who  grew  up  there  would  be  diametrically  opposed 
to  Rice  as  an  adult.  Her  name  is  .Angela  Davis.)  Rice's  long 
road  to  arch-conservatism  is  paved  with  grants  and  access 
to  political  power  and  corporate  boards,  making  it  a  typical 
Bushv\oman  story.  Flanders  correctly  wrote  that  Rice  has 
played  into  America's  self-sustained  "fuzzy"  memories  about 
race  Freeman  the  fictional  every  man  activist  of  "The 
BoondiKks."  the  syndicated  comic  strip  is  wrong  about 
helping  Rice  by  getting  her  a  blind  date;  Rice  doesn't  need  a 
man  as  much  as  she  needs  a  conscience 


p/ioto  by  Theodore  Hennessy 


"By  their  individual  accomplishments,"  wrote  Flanders,  Bush's 
top  women  "are  supposed  to  prove  that  opportunity  exists  for  all."  But 
it's  all  myth,  reveals  the  author:  virtually  all  of  the  Bushwomen  are 
heavily  funded  by  foundations  and  corporations  —  and,  ironically,  are 
now  direct  beneficiaries  of  the  feminism  they  now  symbolically  repre- 
sent and  actually  disdain.  And  always  nearby.  Roe  v..  Wade  swings  on 
the  margins  of  public  debate  like  Edgar  Allan  Poe's  pendulum. 

Until  now,  it's  been  easy  to  ignore  Laura  Flanders.  Bushwomen 
has  already  penetrated  The  New  York  Times  bestseller  list.  But  still, 
her  watchdog  could  be  barking  in  vain,  since  its  masters  have  taken 
out  their  hearing  aids  for  anyone  Left  of  the  Democratic  Leadership 
Council.  She  is  using  fact-checked  words  during  a  period  in  which 
televised  images  plaster  over  what  is  left  (and  Left?)  of  the  American 
consciousness.  Anyone  grinding  his  or  her  teeth  watching  the  Estab- 
lishment Media's  wall-to-wall  coverage  of  the  Reagan  death  and  fu- 
neral got  a  painful  reminder  of  that.  So  starting  from  scratch  seems  to 
be  the  progressive's  stock  in  trade. 

So,  then,  why  do  all  this  work  when  "flyover  country"  —  loudly 
represented  by  those  very  angry  people  who  call  C-SPAN's  "Washing- 
ton Journal"  every  morning  and  ditto  Rush  and  his  clones  on  the  radio 
every  weekday  afternoon  —  is  converted  by  a  certain  mythological 
view  of  America,  not  facts?  (After  all,  generating  sales  worthy  of  The 
Times'  acknowledgement  was  no  shoo-in  in  2004,  even  if  you  do  have 
a  radio  show.)  Flanders  and  Co.  hope  their  collective  effort  will  turn  a 
Confederate  Gray  —  er.  Red  —  state  a  comfortable  shade  of  Blue  this 
November,  but  that  isn't  the  point.  It's  to  remain  sane. 

"She  truly  wants  people  to  change,"  says  Sawaya  of  Flanders. 
"She  truly  wants  people  to  think."  Flanders  projects  a  level  of  intensity 
that  some  might  see  as  intimidating,  according  to  Sawaya,  but  some 
would  also  see  it  as  being  alive. 


Jackson  said  that  if  media  critics  judged  success  and  failure  by  in- 
stitutional change,  they  would  have  packed  their  bags  and  gone  home 
long  ago.  "It  would  be  hard  to  get  out  of  bed  in  the  morning."  But 
there  has  been  a  major  shift  in  public  opinion  over  the  last  20  years, 
she  maintained:  before  FAIR,  most  Americans  saw  their  news  media 
as  sacrosanct;  now,  thanks  to  people  like  Flanders,  media  are  seen 
by  public  as  a  large  and  powerful  collective  political  interest,  capable 
of  being  pushed  by  activism.  People  like  Flanders,  she  explained, 
promote  sanity.  They  inform  the  Left,  she  asserted,  while  taking  that 
perspective  into  the  Reagan  Republican-Soccer  Mom  mainstream.  "I 
think  there  is  a  value  in  that,"  Jackson  added. 

Flanders  said  that  just  educating  would  be  enough.  "What  we're 
trying  to  do  is  to  keep  alive  almost  a  language  of  dissent,"  she  says.  "I 
don't  think  I'm  advocating  a  solution."  The  days  of  worldwide  Lib- 
erate have  faded  like  old  tie-dye.  becoming  as  nostalgic  as  the  Afro 
Pick.  "I  think  we're  involved  in  a  very,  very,  long  tenn  project.  I  don't 
know  if  we'll  see  it.  I'm  not  as  sure."  But  she's  happy  about  her  goal: 
generating  progressive,  feminist  media  criticism  that  goes  beyond  the 
conventional  wisdom.     "6' 

Todd  Steven  Burroughs.  Ph.D.  (tburroughs@jmail.umd.edu)  is  an 
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\\ 

John  k.  samson 


interview  George  B.  Sanchez 

phot    Jon  Shiedewitz 

origiiiaiiy  priiiied  in 

Clamor  #29,  Nov/Dec  2004 


It's  hard  to  separate  John  K.  Samson  from  where  he's  from;  as  the  singer  for  the  Weakerthans,  that  guy  from  Propa- 
gandhi,  a  Canadian  outsider  in  the  world  of  puni<  &  pop.  Maybe  that's  why  his  music  is  so  endearing  —  it  has  place, 
it  has  history,  and  comes  from  somewhere  outside  the  recording  studio,  far  from  the  vapid  center  that  most  popular 
music  tends  to  stream  out  of.  One  night  I  had  the  opportunity  to  meet  up  with  John  after  a  show  at  San  Francisco's 
Bottom  of  the  Hill  club  and  talk  about  his  relationship  to  music,  place,  and  politics. 


In  an  interview-  with  a  Canadian  music  magazine,  you  said  thai  you 
thought  the  role  of  the  artist  is  to  point  out  how  complicated  the  world  is. 

Sounds  about  right. 

Is  there  a  fine  line  between  sloganeering  and  being  heartfelt? 

I  think  my  point  was  that  the  world  is  very  complicated  and  just  fiall 
of  voices.  I  think  the  role  of  the  artist  is  to  express  or  illuminate  those 
voices  and  add  them  to  the  mix.  If  you  listen  and  try  to  understand 
another  person,  you  immediately  invest  that  person  with  dignity  and 
that's  a  very  political  thing.  You  can't  oppress  someone  whose  dignity 
you  respect,  so  1  think  it's  a  liberal  and  radicalizing  idea,  to  try  and 
understand  another  person.  That's  what  great  music  does  and  what 
great  art  strives  for. 

Is  that  something  you  strive  for  through  your  music  and  your  song- 
writing? 

Yeah,  1  think  so.  I  think  I've  tried  to  take  the  specific  details  of  the 
life  I  see  around  me  and  the  way  I  fit  into  it  and  the  way  I  think  other 
people  fit  into  it,  in  my  community  —  and  try  to  express  that  through 
music.  That's  how  I  think  of  what  I  do,  in  a  political  sense. 

One  debate,  one  statement  I've  never  really  understood  is  "art  for 
arts  sake.  " 


Me  neither.  I  don't  think  art  can  exist  in  a  vacuum.  It  has  to  be  received 
by  someone  in  order  to  exist.  It  has  to  do  something  in  the  world.  Art 
for  arts  sake  is  never  —  I  don't  think  it  can  be  true.  If  someone  says 
that  their  art  is  not  political,  that's  a  political  statement  in  itself 

I  always  think  about  that  John  Berger  quote:  the  art  of  any  period 
serves  the  status  quo  of  that  period.  The  mainstream  art  we  see  around 
us  is  definitely  selling  something,  selling  the  stams  quo,  selling  things 
as  they  are,  not  things  as  they  should  be.  You  know,  so  that's  why  art  is 
important.  It's  important  to  get  up  there  and  express  yourself  if  you've 
got  something  to  say. 

/  have  a  statement  that  I  think  leads  into  a  question.  I  differentiate  be- 
tween punk  and  "punk  rock"  because  I  think  there's  a  separation  be- 
ttveen  punk  as  an  ideology  and  punk  rock  as  a  musical  sound.  Punk 
rock,  politically  and  musically  is  often  categorized  for  its  urgency.  You 
left  a  band.  Propagandhi.  that  had  a  much  more  urgent  sound.  I  would 
say,  than  the  music  you  're  making  with  the  Weakerthans.  So.  I  guess  my 
question  is;  has  the  change  in  medium  affected  your  message  at  all? 

That's  a  good  question,  I  haven't  really  thought  of  it  that  way.  But,  I 
think  there's  still  an  immediacy  to  what  we  do.  I  mean,  frankly,  it's  the 
only  music  I  know  how  to  write,  first  off.  The  kind  of  songs  we  write, 
they're  certainly  not  rhetorically  political,  they're  not  stridently  politi- 
cal in  any  sense  of  the  idea  of  propaganda. 

Is  there  a  place  for  propaganda  within  popular  music? 


o 
o 


(11 


Absolutely.  I'mju-st  not  the  person  to  do  it.  I  ean'l  be  that  person.  It's  im- 
portant, politically,  for  people  to  figure  out  what  they  love  to  do.  I  think 
once  you  figure  out  what  you  love  to  do,  then  you  can  figure  out  how  to 
harness  that  into  some  kind  of  action  that  makes  a  mark  in  the  world.  So, 
this,  for  better  or  for  worse,  is  what  I've  figured  out  how  to  do. 

Why  is  geography  so  importanl  to  you  as  a  song  writer? 

I  guess  I've  always  been  attracted  to  what  people  think  of  as  regional 
writers.  I  think  of  novelists  like  Paul  Auster,  who  writes  about  New 
York  and  he  creates  this  New  York  that  doesn't  really  exist  but  seems 
quite  alive  to  me.  It's  his  New  York,  you  know,  but  it  gives  you  a  new 
way  of  looking  at  the  world. 

I  think  I'm  also  interested  in  margins.  I'm  from  a  geographically 
marginal  place.  It's  a  good  metaphor  for  me.  I'm  interested  in  people 
that  are  marginalized  and  places  that  are  marginalized  have  the  same 
character  as  marginaii/ed  people. 

That  being  said,  would  you  ever  think  about  leaving  the  place  that 
you  're  from? 

Oh  yeah,  absolutely.  I  think  about  it  all  the  time.  I  think  about  it  every 
other  day. 

So  what  keeps  you  in  Winnipeg? 

I  don't  know.  It's  the  place  I  understand  best.  1  love  it  and  I  hate  it.  It 
just  seems  that  I  should  stay.  And  I  want  to  stay.  I  think  there  will  be 
a  time  when  I'll  go  away  but  I'm  always  going  to  come  back  there. 
It's  always  the  place  I'm  going  to  return  to.  It's  home  and  even  if  I 
don't  physically  return  there,  I'm  always  going  to  be  writing  about 
that  place.  It's  just  the  place  I've  figured  out,  I  want  to  try  and  express 
what  I  feel  about  it  and  I  haven't  been  able  to  do  that  yet.  I've  still  got 
some  work  to  do  on  it.  You  know,  I'm  never  going  to  be  satisfied  and 
that's  what  keeps  me  going. 

Do  you  think  in  general  though,  within  popular  music,  there  s  a  loss 
of  a  sense  of  place?  And  how  does  that  fit  into  a  homogenous,  market 
culture? 

I  think  it's  really  hard  to  locate  yourself  anywhere  in  the  world  because 
history  seems  to  be  moving  so  quickly.  We're  in  this  trough  of  history 
that  we  can't  see  out  of  Anything  that's  created  is  devoured  and  spat  out 
by  the  market  within  twenty  minutes  of  its  creation.  It  doesn't  have  time 
to  kind  of  grow  and  to  exist,  which  is  another  reason  why  I'm  interested 
in  places  that  are  isolated,  like  small  towns,  small  cities.  But  you're 
right.  It's  a  strange  time  to  be  alive.  It  seems  really  odd  to  me. 

Is  it  ever  really  not  a  strange  time  though? 


As  a  songwriter  I  think  with  this  record,  you  experimented  more  with 
narrative.  "Plea  From  a  Cat  Named  Virtue,  "  "Dinner  with  Foucault.  " 
What  prompted  that? 

The  narrative? 


Yeah  —  was  it  a  conscious  experiment? 


Yeah,  it  was  a  conscious  kind  of  experiment.  1  think  the  last  record 
was  fictional  too,  but  these  ones  are  kind  of,  more  blatantly  fictional. 
I  really  wanted  to  kind  of  try  that.  You  know,  pop  music  is  a  very 
emotional  genre. 

Emotionally  driven  as  opposed  to  technically,  like  classical? 

It's  all  emotional.  Another  John  Berger  quote  is  that  music  began  as  a 
howl,  became  a  prayer,  and  then  a  lament  and  it  still  contains  elements 
of  all  three.  That's  a  quote  I  always  come  back  to  and  I  think  it's  really 
true.  It's  inescapable  and  great.  Part  of  the  great  thing  about  music  is 
that  it  has  these  elements  that  are  just  there  and  they're  always  going 
to  be  there  for  you,  you  just  walk  into  them. 

With  a  title  like  "Ernest  Shackleton.  "  you  expect  something  preten- 
tious, but  it's  sort  of  this  bouncy,  sort  of  a  —  it's  a  fun  song. 

Yeah.  People  have  been  accusing  me  lately  of  being  a  bit  pretentious.  1 
always  say,  well,  I'd  rather  err  on  the  side  of  pretension  than  pretend- 
ing to  be  stupid.  I  think  that's  a  real  problem  in  the  life  of  the  American 
intellectual.  There's  a  real  desire  from  people  — 

To  plead  ignorance. 

Yeah,  to  just  pretend  that  they  don't  read  books.  All  these  college  kids 
in  rock  bands  pretending  that  they  hasen't  been  to  college  and  I'm 
like,  well  —  1  never  went  to  college,  1  haven't  been  to  a  uni\  crsity,  I'm 
interested  in  this  stuff.  I'm  not  a  very  intellectual  person,  but  I'd  like 
to  be.  That's  what  I  aspire  to  be. 

The  Weakerthans.  would  you  say  they  are  an  experiment  in  the  greater 
potential  of  pop  music? 

I  wouldn't  go  that  far.  I  mean,  in  my  fantasy  world,  sure,  but  that's  not 
for  me  to  say.  There's  a  real  impulsive  thing  behind  creation  too  that 
you  can't,  that  I  can't,  don't  know  how  to  intellectualize  and  wouldn't 
want  to.  It's  just  that  impulse  to  make  noise. 

Maybe  that  sort  of  leads  back  to,  again,  academic  debates  about  au- 
thenticity within  music,  which,  I  mean,  ultimately,  you  just  go  around 
in  circles  again. 


o 
o 


00 

in 


No,  it's  not.  Yeah,  you're  right,  but  we  have  our  specific  strangeness 
and  pop  music  is  a  reflection  of  that.  I  think  the  great  kind  of  flashes 
of  truth  emerge  from  people  expressing  what  may  be  mundane  things, 
you  know,  details,  the  kind  of  nuts  and  bolts  of  life. 

Doesn  t  it  drive  you  nuts  that  those  "isolated  "  places  are  also  .striving 
to  he  like  the  homogenized cit}'  centers.' 

In  the  city  I'm  from,  the  focus  is  entirely  th;ii  lilc  is  cKcw  here,  that  life 
is  going  on  somewhere  else.  Toronto  is  the  cultural  center  of  Canada.  I 
always  think  ot  people  in  Wmnipeg  staring  towards  Toronto  as  people 
in  Toronto  stare  towards  New  York;  no  one  is  ever  really  looking  at 
themselves,  you  know,  or  looking  at  each  other.  It's  a  weird  feature  in 
a  sped-up  culture,  in  a  culture  that  has  become  more  and  less  mediated 
at  the  same  time. 


That's  true.  It's  like  when  people  go  up  to  a  novelist  and  get  mad  at 
them  for  their  stories  not  being  true.  It's  like.  well,  that's  not  what 
we're  trying  to  do.  There's  an  authenticity  to  distortion,  you  know.  I 
think  1  keep  coming  back  to  the  word  reconstruction.  A  reconstruc- 
tion of  reality  is  not  necessarily  any  less  real  than  reality  It's  always 
—  it's  useful  in  a  way,  to  kind  of  rennent  the  world,  "ir 

George  B.  Sanchez  is  a  staff  writer  for  the  Montcrc)  Herald  in  Sa- 
linas, California.  A  contributing  editor  to  the  latest  incarnation  of 
HI  .'\ndar  magazine.  Sanchez's  work  has  appeared  in  Narco  News, 
Mother  Jones,  and  Punk  Planet  An  advi.sor  at  the  2004  Sarco  News 
School  of  Authentic  Journalism  in  Bolivia.  Sanchez  is  also  the  gui- 
tarist and  vocalist  for  the  Salinas  band  Rum  c$  Rebellion  He  can  be 
reached  at  gbernardsanchez(a  aol.com 


0JD  STATES 


H 


s    Uncooperative  since  1997. 

'~     www.g7welcomingcommittee.com 


CDOUTJULY12^^2ouo 


Distributed  by  Suburtan  Home  ^fek 
www.suburtjanhomerecords.com  UQMi 


VERONICA  LIPGLOSS 
^  THE  EVIL  EYES 

GSL102  CD  OUT  AUGUST  05 


o 
o 


O 


mike  davis 


interview  Jim  Straub 

illustration  Dustin  Amery  Hostetler 

originally  printed  in 

Clamor  #30,  Jan/Feb  2005 


Historian  Mike  Davis  is  one  of  America's  best  known  social  critics  —  a  position  he  does  not  exactly  relish.  He  once 
favorably  compared  his  first  job,  as  a  meat  cutter,  to  his  current  position  as  a  tenured  professor  at  the  University 
of  California-Irvine.  "Being  a  butcher  was  skilled  and  socially  useful  labor  —  unlike  so  much  of  academia,"  he  said. 
Davis  first  gained  notoriety  when  his  book  about  Los  Angeles,  City  of  Quartz,  predicted  riots  and  unrest  in  the  city's 
near  future.  When  the  Rodney  King  riots  broke  out  barely  a  year  later,  Davis  became  a  left-wing  prophet  of  urban 
American  catastrophe  —  an  image  stoked  by  his  next  book  {Ecology  of  Fear),  a  political  history  of  disaster  in  Los 
Angeles. 

Since  then,  Davis  has  broadened  his  range.  His  published  work  includes  books  about  everything  from  San  Diego 
and  Las  Vegas  to  famines  caused  by  imperialism  and  drought  in  the  19th-century  Third  World.  Recently,  Davis 
expanded  his  portfolio  even  further,  writing  a  trilogy  of  young  adult  books  about  a  team  of  young  scientists  who  get 
embroiled  in  political  adventures  —  co-written  with  Davis'  young  son,  and  edited  by  peace  activist  Viggo  Mortensen 
(better  known  as  Aragom  in  the  Lord  of  the  Rings).  Next  year,  back  in  Davis'  original  field  of  radical  urban  studies. 
Verso  will  publish  his  book  Planet  of  Slums  —  an  investigation  of  the  global  rise  of  slum-cities  in  the  Third  World  that 
sees  Davis  studying  Islamic  civil  society  in  the  Middle  East,  street  gangs  and  religious  populists  in  Africa  and  Asia, 
and  Pentecostal  Christianity  and  radical  leftists  in  Latin  America. 

So  how  did  a  meat-cutter  from  San  Diego  come  to  write  radical  adventures  about  young  scientists  with  King 
Aragom  as  an  editor?  Davis  attributes  his  life's  course  to  being  politicized  by  the  civil  rights  movement  in  the  Sixties. 
After  that,  he  worked  as  an  organizer  for  Students  for  a  Democratic  Society  and  the  Communist  Party,  as  a  Teamster 
trucker  and  tour  bus  driver,  and  eventually  as  an  editor  at  New  Left  Review  and  Verso  books.  This  background,  as  a 
working-class  southern  Califomian  and  committed  radical,  has  given  him  the  drive  to  study  and  publish  so  broadly 
—  and  has  also  fueled  his  critics.  Davis  has  gained  a  small  army  of  conservative  fact-checkers  who  comb  his  books' 
thousands  of  footnotes  searching  for  errors  to  justify  their  red-baiting.  For  his  part,  Davis  proudly  admits,  "I  am  a 
socialist  in  the  same  sense  that  Billy  Graham  is  a  Baptist."  A  willingness  to  continue  championing  radical  causes 
unfashionable  in  Patriot  Act-era  America  has  brought  him  to  his  current  project:  researching  the  history  of  left-wing 
terrorism  in  the  century  stretching  from  the  1870s  to  1970s. 


o 
o 


Ok 


Clamor:  Can  you  tell  us  ahoul  this  hook.  Heroes  of  Hell? 

Mike  Davis:  Heroes  of  Hell  is  a  history  of  revolutionary  terrorism  from 
the  1870s  to  the  1970s,  covering  groups  ranging  from  the  Peoples' 
Will  in  Russia  to  the  Tupamaros  of  Uruguay  in  the  '70s.  I  anticipate 
that  the  sympathies  of  this  book  (toward  those  who  killed  tyrants  and 
exploiters,  not  innocents)  will  probably  violate  the  Patriot  Act. 

Ever  since  the  broken  glass  in  the  streets  of  Seattle  during  the  J  999 
protests  against  the  WTO.  there  has  been  a  series  of  debates  about 
things  like  properly  destruction  in  the  global  Justice  movement.  What 
were  the  debates  about  violence  in  radical  movements  of  the  past? 

Well  1  don't  know  I'd  call  trashing  a  McDonald's  "revolutionary 


Their  most  formidable  critic  on  the  Left  was  Trotsky.  He  attacked 
the  SRs,  not  on  moral  grounds  (who  could  feel  sorry  for  the  butchers 
of  the  people?),  but  for  their  substitution  of  the  indi\  idual  heroic  act 
for  the  self-activity  of  the  working  class.  He  w  as  extremely  skeptical 
of  revolutionary  strategies  that  envision  heroic  small-group  actions  as 
"motors "  for  uprisings,  as  attempts  to  short-circuit  the  arduous  work 
of  mass  organization.  At  the  same  time,  he  considered  "working  class 
anger"  to  be  a  noble  and  essentially  creative  force. 

What  are  your  own  personal  feelings,  on  the  debates  about  violence 
and  protest  today? 

My  position  will  undoubtedly  anger  all  sides.  Of  course  I  believe 
in   property   destruction,    theft   and   (counter-)    violence:    in   some 


Give  me  a  break.  Our  internationalist  duty  in  1969  was  to  go  into  the  plants  and  schools  and 
help  organize  rebellion,  not  blow  up  non-coms  and  post  offices.  The  Weather  Underground 
were  a  narcissistic,  authoritarian  cult,  with  contempt  for  ordinary  people  and  ordinary  leftists, 
who  hallucinated  on  comic-book  politics  and  the  usual  American  quest  for  celebrity  ... 


o 
o 


violence."  first  off.  But  to  look  at  the  past:  Setting  aside  the  ultimate 
questions  of  insurrection  and  protracted  amied  struggle,  the  classical 
debates  about  revolutionary  violence  concerned  three  major  issues: 
self-defense,  retaliation  and  the  catalytic  or  instigatory  deed. 

To  take  self-defense  first.  Except  perhaps  in  England,  strikers 
and  protestors  everywhere  faced  universal  police  and  employer 
violence,  and  all  factions  of  the  Left  and  the  working-class  public 
routinely  supported  the  right  of  self-defense  in  the  extreme.  Industrial 
unionism  only  triumphed  in  the  1 930s  because  it  was  able  to  come  up 
with  a  tactic  that  neutralized  employer  violence:  the  sit-down  strike 
and  the  potential  destruction  of  the  bosses'  property.  Sometimes, 
however,  as  during  the  Minneapolis  General  Strike  of  1934  [when 
a  truck  drivers'  strike  faced  such  employer  opposition  that  only 
a  general  strike  and  serious  street-fighting  was  able  to  secure  the 
workers'  union  rights]  the  issue  had  to  be  settled  militarily  in  the 
streets.  It  was  also  essential,  of  course,  that  there  were  pro-labor 
governors  in  the  state  houses  in  Michigan  and  Minnesota  who.  in  the 
last  instance,  refused  the  bosses'  pleas  to  give  the  National  Guard  the 
order  to  fire.  Otherwise  we  would  be  talking  today  about  the  great 
Flint  and  Minneapolis  massacres. 

The  second  issue  of  an  "eye  for  an  eye."  however,  split  the  Left 
and  the  labor  movement.  In  the  United  States,  acts  like  anarchist 
[Alexander]  Berkman's  shooting  of  Henry  Frick  [in  return  for  Frick's 
killing  of  striking  steelworkers]  evoked  sympathy.  But  a  moral 
economy  of  re\enge  was  almost  always  impractical  and  suicidal.  The 
IWW.  which  owed  nothing  to  bourgeois  morality.  strictK  eschewed 
terrorism,  although,  when  pushed  to  the  wall,  like  [union  organizer] 
Wesley  Everest  during  the  [1919]  siege  of  the  Ccntralia,  Washington 
IWW  headquarters,  they  shot  back  (in  his  case  with  deadly  accuracy). 

The  third  case  concerns  the  classic  "propaganda  of  the  deed": 
the  advocacy  of  hcri)ic.  usually  suicidal  attacks  on  the  \  cr\  summits 
of  power,  in  belief  that  either  the  repressive  state  could  be  broken  by 
the  decimation  of  its  cadre,  or,  more  commonly,  that  such  acts  would 
inspire  the  masses  to  insurrection.  The  greatest  revolutionary  terrorists, 
of  course,  were  the  Peoples'  Will  and  their  descendants,  the  Militarv 
Organization  of  the  Russian  Social  Re\olutionary  Party.  Very  rarcl\ 
injurmg  innocents  or  bystanders,  they  attacked  the  czarist  state  with 
extraordinary  courage  and  constant  ingenuity:  assassinating  (if  I 
recall  correctly)  a  czar,  a  crown  prince,  two  prime  ministers  and 
scores  of  generals,  police  chiefs  and  ministers.  They  practiced  mass- 
production  terrorism. 


circumstances  and  as  mass  actions.  The  hungry  have  the  right  to 
loot  supermarkets.  Strikers  and  demonstrators  ha\e  a  right  to  defend 
themselves.  If  the  teacher  slaps  you.  slap  him  back.  At  times,  it 
insufficient  to  protest  the  power,  you  must  actually  fight  it.  And  so  on. 

But  some  of  what  now  calls  itself  the  "black  bloc"  or  "anarchism" 
is  just  a  selfish  gentrification  of  working-class  anger.  [IWW  leader] 
Big  Bill  Haywood  or  [legendary  Spanish  anarchist  Buenaventura) 
Durruti  would  scoff  at  such  minor  street  theatrics.  I've  always  hated 
the  types,  whatever  their  politics,  who  like  to  throw  rocks  from  the 
back  of  a  crowd,  then  let  the  mass  of  demonstrators  take  the  charge.  Or 
macho  actors  in  balaclavas  who  disdain  any  democratic  discipline.  It 
is  simplv  impcnnissible  to  hijack  other  peoples'  protests  or  make  them 
the  involuntary  targets  for  police  retaliation. 

At  the  same  time,  however.  I  resent  overly-organized 
demonstrations  without  any  dimension  of  spontaneity  or  free 
association,  the  kind  of  actions  that  arc  more  like  mass  safety-values 
(or  funerals)  than  authentic  contestations.  Or  a  protest  politics  that 
plays  simply  to  the  mass  media  and  the  sound  bite,  with  no  regard 
for  the  on-going  organization  of  protestors  or  their  involvement  in  the 
actual  elaboration  of  policy  and  strategic  direction. 

Both  "black  bloc"  types  and  movement  bureaucrats  have  a 
similar  contempt  for  protests  as  social  processes  with  unpredictable 
grassroots  dynamics.  One  fetishizes  the  "deed,"  the  other  "legality." 
One  always  wants  to  break  through  the  fence,  the  other,  never.  Neither 
pays  any  attention  to  the  actual  mood  or  the  expressed  opinions  of  the 
mass  of  demonstrators. 

So.  smashing  McDonald's  may  be  good  fun  (and  in  some 
circumstances,  a  good  tactic)  but  it  isn't  the  same  as  smashing  the  stale, 
or,  for  that  matter,  of  organizing  a  movement.  On  the  other  hand,  such 
infantilism  is  far  less  of  a  problem  than  the  tendency  of  some  leaders 
and  coalitions  to  accede  to  the  constantly  tighter  circumscription  o\' 
protest  by  police  and  the  homeland  security  state.  If  the  right  to  protest 
is  to  sur\ ive,  it  must  be  aggressively  asserted  in  all  circumstances. 

(I<;.s7;'/  Heroes  of  Hell  originally  planned  to  end  in  the  '3(h?  What 
inspired  you  to  extend  your  narrative  to  the  most  tvcent  wave  of 
worldwide  ivvolutiimary  terrorism  in  the  '6()s  and  '7()s.'  .4s  an 
oiganizcr  with  SDS  back  then,  you  must  have  had  plenty  of  personal 
experience  with  Weathermen  and  others  who  went  underground  and 
declared  war  on  the  i.S.  government  as  the  lletnam  War  ground  on 


Originally  I  believed  that  there  was  little  connection  between 
"classical"  revolutionary  terrorism  in  its  Mediterranean  and  Slavic 
incarnations,  and  the  new  urban  guerrilla  or  terrorist  groups  of  the 
1970s.  So  I  decided  that  Heroes  of  Hell  should  logically  end  with 
the  Spanish  Civil  War  and  the  failure  of  the  Italian  anarchists  to 
assassinate  Mussolini.  Then  I  discovered  that  there  were,  in  fact, 
decisive  human  and  ideological  linkages  between  the  generation 
of  Durutti  and  the  first  New  Left  urban  guerrilla  groups  in  Spain 
and  Argentina. 

And,  yes,  I  have  personal  recollections  of  the  Weathermen  and 
similar  types.  In  1969  there  were  incredible  opportunities  on  every 
hand  to  expand  and  deepen  the  social  base  of  the  anti-war  and 
New  Left  movements.  Wildcat  strikes  were  breaking  out  across  the 
country,  the  women's  movement  was  exploding,  high-school  kids 
and  gays  were  rebelling,  GIs  were  fragging  their  officers,  and  the 
League  of  Revolutionary  Black  Workers  was  setting  Detroit  on  its  ear. 
Yet  at  precisely  this  moment  of  maximum  popular  energy  and  Left 
opportunity,  the  Weather  cadre  decided  to  go  underground. 

After  a  few  silly  attempts  to  cajole  blue-collar  kids  to  support  the 
Viet  Cong,  the  Weather  leaders  (mostly  scions  of  ruling-class  families) 


Well,  yes.  After  driving  trucks  for  a  long  time,  I  wanted  to  get  a  union 
scholarship  and  go  to  college.  I  decided  I  needed  the  time,  discipline 
and  luxury  of  school  in  order  to  learn  to  write  —  even  composing  a 
personal  letter  gave  me  problems  then.  So  I  switched  jobs  and  started 
driving  a  tour  bus  in  Los  Angeles,  with  the  idea  that  I'd  work  there  for 
awhile,  build  up  some  seniority  so  I  could  work  part-time  while  going 
to  UCLA.  That  was  the  plan,  but  after  I'd  been  there  just  a  couple 
months  a  strike  broke  out  and  quickly  got  violent.  I  got  in  trouble 
supposedly  for  beating  up  one  of  the  scabs  who'd  driven  a  bus  through 
our  picket  line  and  hurt  one  of  us.  Things  were  going  crazy,  so  next 
thing  you  know  my  co-workers  called  a  secret  union  meeting  and 
someone  proposed  we  each  put  up  400  bucks  and  hire  a  mob  hit  man 
to  kill  the  leader  of  the  strikebreakers.  I  was  totally  again.st  this.  So 
I  got  up  and  made  the  best  speech  of  my  life,  and  was  out-voted  40 
to  1 .  In  the  end  the  hit  men  who  were  hired  were  arrested  for  drunk- 
driving  while  on  their  way  to  do  the  deed,  and  so  we  avoided  charges 
of  criminal  conspiracy  and  I  got  to  go  to  UCLA  instead  of  prison. 

What  that  all  taught  me  is  that  ordinary  American  workers  may 
often  be  conservative  people,  but  when  pushed  against  the  wall  and 
threatened  with  the  loss  of  20, 30  years  of  job  seniority  and  violence  from 


...  and  it  kills  me  today  that  young  sincere  radicals,  who  have  never  heard  of  real  heroes  like 
James  Forman,  Dave  Dellinger,  Nelson  Peery,  Carl  Boggs,  Fannie  Lou  Hamer  or  Hal  Draper, 
believe  that  [Weathermen  leaders]  Mark  Rudd  or  Bernadine  Dorhn  were  somehow  the  very 
conscience  of  the  Left  in  1 969. 


decided  the  white  working  class  was  a  lost  cause  and  turned  instead 
to  orgies  and  bombs. 

Recall  the  plot  that  ended  prematurely  with  the  tragic  Townhouse 
explosion.  Who  were  they  planning  to  kill?  Not  General  Westmoreland, 
the  butcher  of  Saigon,  but  rather  some  enlisted  men  and  their  wives 
at  a  dance.  The  rest  of  the  Left,  according  to  them,  were  punks  and 
cowards,  because  we  preferred  to  organize  against  the  war  at  union 
meetings  rather  than  put  on  clever  disguises  and  plant  bombs.  Were 
they  "frustrated  radicals"?  Revolutionaries  in  an  American  desert 
with  nothing  left  but  their  own  desperation  and  a  debt  of  solidarity  to 
the  Vietnamese? 

Give  me  a  break.  Our  internationalist  duty  in  1 969  was  to  go  into 
the  plants  and  schools  and  help  organize  rebellion,  not  blow  up  non- 
coms  and  post  offices.  The  Weather  Underground  were  a  narcissistic, 
authoritarian  cult,  with  contempt  for  ordinary  people  and  ordinary 
leftists,  who  hallucinated  on  comic-book  politics  and  the  usual 
American  quest  for  celebrity.  And  it  kills  me  today  that  young  sincere 
radicals,  who  have  never  heard  of  real  heroes  like  James  Fornian. 
Dave  Dellinger,  Nelson  Peery,  Carl  Boggs,  Fannie  Lou  Hamer  or  Hal 
Draper,  believe  that  [Weathermen  leaders]  Mark  Rudd  or  Bernadine 
Dorhn  were  somehow  the  very  conscience  of  the  Left  in  1969. 

/  understand  you  've  had  firsthand  experience  with  difficult  issues  of 
self-defense  and  violence,  in  your  earlier  career  as  Teamster  trucker 
and  bus  driver 


the  boss,  they  will  not  hesitate  to  get  violent,  too.  And  there's  a  place  for 
that.  The  issue  is  it  has  to  be  a  strategic  thing,  not  some  kind  of  crazy 
thing    like    what    we 
almost  did.  'if 


Jim  Straub  spent 
the  past  year  as  an 
organizer/or  a  hospital 
workers  union  in  Ohio. 
He  is  currently  making 
a  cross-countiy  tour 
of  historical  sites  of 
America's  labor  wars 
and  native  uprisings 
—  and  if  he  can 
stay  on  your  couch 
in  your  town,  email 
Jimstraub@riseup.  net. 


subscribe 


www.clamormagazine.org 


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